The CEO Next Door: The 4 Behaviors that Transform Ordinary People into World-Class Leaders

By Elena L. Botelho & Kim R. Powell & Tahl Raz

Everything we thought we knew about what it takes to get to the top is wrong. You must graduate from an elite college or business school. In fact, only 7 percent of the CEOs of today’s companies went to a top school–and 8 percent didn’t graduate from college at all. Given how cuthroat the competition to get to the corner office is, you can never suffer a career detour or make a major mistake. In fact, people who have become CEOs have on average had five to seven career setbacks on their way to the top.
When most of us think of a CEO, we tend to think of companies in the Fortune 100, or 500, or if we’re being particularly generous, the Fortune 1000. In fact, however, there are more than 6 million CEOs in America today of companies with under 500 employees. And the overwhelming majority of those CEOs did not go to Harvard, Wharton or Stanford business schools, or the University of Chicago. Some are immigrants; many worked their way up through the ranks from entry-level positions. They do, however, share certain attributes, as Botelho and Powell have discoverd over the years from their work with CEOs and by mining their company’s research and databanks. The people who become CEO’s are decisive–they may not always make the best decision, but they make the best decision they can based on the information they have at the time; they are reliable–they deliver exactly what they promised to deliver, on time, without exception.

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

By Jocko Willink, Leif Babin

Willink and Babin returned home from deployment and instituted SEAL leadership training to pass on their harsh lessons learned in combat to help forge the next generation of SEAL leaders. After leaving the SEAL Teams, they launched a company, Echelon Front, to teach those same leadership principles to leaders in businesses, companies, and organizations across the civilian sector. Since that time, they have trained countless leaders and worked with hundreds of companies in virtually every industry across the U.S. and internationally, teaching them how to develop their own high-performance teams and most effectively lead those teams to dominate their battlefields.

Since it’s release in October 2015, Extreme Ownership has revolutionized leadership development and set a new standard for literature on the subject. Required reading for many of the most successful organizations, it has become an integral part of the official leadership training programs for scores of business teams, military units, and first responders. Detailing the mindset and principles that enable SEAL units to accomplish the most difficult combat missions, Extreme Ownership demonstrates how to apply them to any team or organization, in any leadership environment. A compelling narrative with powerful instruction and direct application, Extreme Ownership challenges leaders everywhere to fulfill their ultimate purpose: lead and win.

How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In

By Jim Collins

Decline can be avoided. Decline can be detected. Decline can be reversed.

Amidst the desolate landscape of fallen great companies, Jim Collins began to wonder: How do the mighty fall? Can decline be detected early and avoided? How far can a company fall before the path toward doom becomes inevitable and unshakable? How can companies reverse course?
In How the Mighty Fall, Collins confronts these questions, offering leaders the well-founded hope that they can learn how to stave off decline and, if they find themselves falling, reverse their course.

No Try Only Do: Building A Business On Purpose, Alignment, And Accountability

By Andy Bailey

No Try, Only Do is about how to avoid “the weak option,” why entrepreneurs often fall back on it, and the lessons Andy learned via his own bloody experiences over the years. If you’re a business owner or entrepreneur, there’s no room for “try” in your vocabulary.

American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company

By Bryce G. Hoffman

The inside story of the epic turnaround of Ford Motor Company under the leadership of CEO Alan Mulally.

At the end of 2008, Ford Motor Company was just months away from running out of cash. With the auto industry careening toward ruin, Congress offered all three Detroit automakers a bailout. General Motors and Chrysler grabbed the taxpayer lifeline, but Ford decided to save itself.

Under the leadership of charismatic CEO Alan Mulally, Ford had already put together a bold plan to unify its divided global operations, transform its lackluster product lineup, and overcome a dys­functional culture of infighting, backstabbing, and excuses. It was an extraordinary risk, but it was the only way the Ford family—America’s last great industrial dynasty—could hold on to their company.

Mulally and his team pulled off one of the great­est comebacks in business history. As the rest of Detroit collapsed, Ford went from the brink of bankruptcy to being the most profitable automaker in the world. American Icon is the compelling, behind-the-scenes account of that epic turnaround.

In one of the great management narratives of our time, Hoffman puts the reader inside the boardroom as Mulally uses his celebrated Business Plan Review meet­ings to drive change and force Ford to deal with the painful realities of the American auto industry.

Topgrading: How Leading Companies Win by Hiring, Coaching, and Keeping the Best People

By Bradford D. Smart Ph.D.

Great companies don’t just depend on strategies—they depend on people. The more great people on your team, the more successful your organization will be. But that’s easier said than done. Statistically, half of all employment decisions result in a mishire: The wrong person winds up in the wrong job. But companies that have followed Bradford Smart’s advice in Topgrading have boosted their successful hiring rate to 90 percent or better, giving them an unbeatable competitive advantage.
Now Smart has fully revised his 1999 management classic to reintroduce the topgrading concept, which works for companies large and small in any industry. The author spells out his practical approach to finding and managing A-level talent—as well as coaching B players to turn them into A players. He provides intriguing case studies drawn from more than four thousand in-depth interviews.

Worth Doing Wrong: The Quest to Build a Culture That Rocks

By Arnie Malham

The Quest to Build a Culture That Rocks
Business is hard. Arnie Malham, founder and president of cj Advertising, understands this thoroughly. But the challenges that make business hard are more than just obstacles–they provide the foundation to building and strengthening a culture that attracts the best people to do the best work.

In Worth Doing Wrong, Malham provides strategies for creating a culture that will help you smash business goals, achieve win-win relationships with your clients, generate buzz in your community, and cultivate a workplace that you and your employees will love.

Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable

By Tim Grover

Direct, blunt, and brutally honest, Grover breaks down what it takes to be unstoppable: you keep going when everyone else is giving up, you thrive under pressure, you never let your emotions make you weak. In “The Relentless 13,” he details the essential traits shared by the most intense competitors and achievers in sports, business, and all walks of life. Relentless shows you how to trust your instincts and get in the Zone; how to control and adapt to any situation; how to find your opponent’s weakness and attack. Grover gives you the same advice he gives his world-class clients—“don’t think”—and shows you that anything is possible. Packed with previously untold stories and unparalleled insight into the psyches of the most successful and accomplished athletes of our time, Relentless shows you how even the best get better . . . and how you can too.

The Surrender Experiment: My Journey into Life’s Perfection

By Michael A. Singer

Michael A. Singer, author of The Untethered Soul, tells the extraordinary story of what happened when, after a deep spiritual awakening, he decided to let go of his personal preferences and simply let life call the shots. As Singer takes you on this great experiment and journey into life’s perfection, the events that transpire will both challenge your deepest assumptions about life and inspire you to look at your own life in a radically different way.

The Compound Effect

By Darren Hardy

No gimmicks. No Hyperbole. No Magic Bullet. The Compound Effect is based on the principle that decisions shape your destiny. Little, everyday decisions will either take you to the life you desire or to disaster by default. Darren Hardy, publisher of Success Magazine, presents The Compound Effect, a distillation of the fundamental principles that have guided the most phenomenal achievements in business, relationships, and beyond. This easy-to-use, step-by-step operating system allows you to multiply your success, chart your progress, and achieve any desire. If you’re serious about living an extraordinary life, use the power of The Compound Effect to create the success you want.

Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy – Until You’re 80 and Beyond

By Chris Crowley, Henry Lodge

These are the books that show us how to turn back our biological clocks—how to put off 70% of the normal problems of aging (weakness, sore joints, bad balance) and eliminate 50% of serious illness and injury.

The key to the program is found in Harry’s Rules: Exercise six days a week. Don’t eat crap. Connect and commit to others. There are seven rules all together, based on the latest findings in cell physiology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and experimental psychology. Dr. Lodge explains how and why they work—and Chris Crowley, who is living proof of their effectiveness (skiing better today, for example, than he did twenty years ago), gives the just-as-essential motivation.
Both men and women can become functionally younger every year for the next five to ten years, then continue to live with newfound vitality and pleasure deep into our 80s and beyond.

The 5 Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential

By John C. Maxwell

#1 New York Times bestselling author John C. Maxwell explains how true leadership works and makes it accessible to everyone. Leadership does not come from your title. In fact, being named to a position is only the first and lowest of the five levels every effective leader achieves. To become more than a boss people are required to follow, you must master the ability to inspire and build a team that produces not only results, but also future leaders.

Leadership 101: What Every Leader Needs to Know

By John C. Maxwell

Drawing from John Maxwell’s bestsellers Developing the Leader Within You, The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader, and Becoming a Person of Influence, Leadership 101 explores the timeless principles that have become Dr. Maxwell’s trademark style. In a concise, straightforward style, Maxwell focuses on essential and time-tested qualities necessary for true leadership — influence, integrity, attitude, vision, problem-solving, and self-discipline — and guides readers through practical steps to develop true leadership in their lives and the lives of others.

Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t

Imagine a world where almost everyone wakes up inspired to go to work, feels trusted and valued during the day, then returns home feeling fulfilled.

This is not a crazy, idealized notion. Today, in many successful organizations, great leaders are creating environments in which people naturally work together to do remarkable things.

In his travels around the world since the publication of his bestseller Start with Why, Simon Sinek noticed that some teams were able to trust each other so deeply that they would literally put their lives on the line for each other. Other teams, no matter what incentives were offered, were doomed to infighting, fragmentation and failure. Why?

Leaders Open Doors

By Bill Treasurer

These seven simple words, spoken by author Bill Treasurer s five-year-old son, cut straight to what matters most about leadership: True leaders open doors for people. This radically simple concept is the heart of Leaders Open Doors.

This book presents a fresh and unique take on leadership that will benefit experienced leaders and those just starting their leadership journeys. With a little courage, anyone at any level can be a leader.

Scaling Up : How a Few Companies Make It…and Why the rest Don’t (Rockefeller Habits 2.0)

By Verne Harnish

It’s been over a decade since Verne Harnish’s best-selling book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits was first released. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It…and Why the Rest Don’t is the first major revision of this business classic. In Scaling Up, Harnish and his team share practical tools and techniques for building an industry-dominating business. These approaches have been honed from over three decades of advising tens of thousands of CEOs and executives and helping them navigate the increasing complexities (and weight) that come with scaling up a venture. This book is written so everyone — from frontline employees to senior executives — can get aligned in contributing to the growth of a firm. There’s no reason to do it alone, yet many top leaders feel like they are the ones dragging the rest of the organization up the S-curve of growth. The goal of this book is to help you turn what feels like an anchor into wind at your back — creating a company where the team is engaged; the customers are doing your marketing; and everyone is making money. To accomplish this, Scaling Up focuses on the four major decision areas every company must get right: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. The book includes a series of new one-page tools including the updated One-Page Strategic Plan and the Rockefeller Habits ChecklistTM, which more than 40,000 firms around the globe have used to scale their companies successfully — many to $1 billion and beyond. Running a business is ultimately about freedom. Scaling Up shows business leaders how to get their organizations moving in sync to create something significant and enjoy the ride.

1001 Ways to Reward Employees

By Bob Nelson Ph.D.

Why is 1001 Ways to Reward Employees, with over 1.4 million copies in print, such an extraordinary bestseller? Because a little over ten years ago Bob Nelson took the seeds of an idea and turned it into something indispensable for business. The idea? That it’s not a raise that motivates an employee, and it’s not a promotion—what really sparks a person to perform are those intangible, unexpected gestures that signify real appreciation for a job well done.

Now, after having worked with thousands of organizations in the years since 11001 Ways to Reward. . . was first published, Bob Nelson presents a second edition packed with hundreds of new ideas and examples of how companies are using rewards and recognitions to boost productivity and keep their valued employees happy. Airplane mechanics are rewarded with balloons and pinwheels. Another manager calls his employees’ mothers and thanks them for raising such industrious children. There are ideas from the offbeat (The Margarita Award) to the company-wide (a quiet room) to the embarrassingly simple (a hand-written thank you note) to the wacky (the Laugh-a-Day challenge) to the formal (a two-week promotion to special assistant to the president). Each section includes no-cost rewards and low-cost rewards, both public and private, making this new edition an indispensable resource for making the person/achievement/reward equation work.

HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing People

By Harvard Business Review

If you read nothing else on managing people, read these 10 articles.We’ve combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you maximize your employees’ performance.

The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate The Three Essential Virtues

By Patrick Lencioni

In The Ideal Team Player, Lencioni tells the story of Jeff Shanley, a leader desperate to save his uncle’s company by restoring its cultural commitment to teamwork. Jeff must crack the code on the virtues that real team players possess, and then build a culture of hiring and development around those virtues.

Beyond the fable, Lencioni presents a practical framework and actionable tools for identifying, hiring, and developing ideal team players. Whether you’re a leader trying to create a culture around teamwork, a staffing professional looking to hire real team players, or a team player wanting to improve yourself, this book will prove to be as useful as it is compelling.

Leadocracy: Hiring More Great Leaders (Like You) into Government

By Geoff Smart

Leadocracy will tell you –Why great leaders avoid government
–How the 3 As of Leadership can help us identify, hire, and become better leaders
–How we can avoid nonleader candidates like the Turtle, Bureaucrat, Screamer, and Idealist
–How the adrenaline rush of flow can offer leaders from the private sector the adventure of a lifetime

managing for results

By Peter F. Drucker

The effective business, Peter Drucker observes, focuses on opportunities rather than problems. How this focus is achieved in order to make the organization prosper and grow is the subject of this companion to his classic work, The Practice of Management. Managing for Results shows what the executive decision maker must do to move his enterprise forward. Drucker again employs his particular genius for breaking through conventional outlooks and opening up new perspectives for profits and growth.

Outrageous Empowerment: The Incredible Story of Giving Employees Their Brains Back

By Ron Lovett

Ron Lovett went from breaking up brawls at nightclubs to providing personal protection to some of the world’s biggest A-List celebrities – a fifteen-year roller-coaster ride of managing against the grain in uncharted territory. In Outrageous Empowerment, Ron Lovett shares how he transformed his one-employee business in Halifax, Nova Scotia, into a leading national security company with over fifteen hundred frontline staff. Ron will reveal the techniques he used to turn disgruntled employees into passionate stakeholders who carried out the company’s visions. All large companies talk about employee alignment through culture and purpose. Ron will show you how with simple, scalable systems and processes which ensure that an enterprise’s productivity matches its mission and empowers its staff to execute.

The Platinum Rule: Discover the Four Basic Business Personalities and How They Can Lead You to Success

By Tony Alessandra

In this entertaining and thought-provoking book, Tony Alessandra and Michael O’Connor argue that the “Golden Rule” is not always the best way to approach people. Rather, they propose the Platinum Rule: “Do unto others as “they’d” like done unto them”. In other words, find out what makes people tick and go from there.

The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal

By Jim Loehr, Tony Schwartz

As bestselling authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz demonstrate in this groundbreaking book, managing energy, not time, is the key to enduring high performance as well as to health, happiness, and life balance. The Power of Full Engagement is a highly practical, scientifically based approach to managing your energy more skillfully both on and off the job by laying out the key training principles and provides a powerful, step-by-step program that will help you to:

Above all, this book provides a life-changing road map to becoming more fully engaged on and off the job, meaning physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned.

The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace: Empowering Organizations by Encouraging People

This book will give you the tools to improve staff morale, create a more positive workplace, and increase employee engagement. How? By teaching you to effectively communicate authentic appreciation and encouragement to employees, co-workers, and leaders. Most relational problems in organizations flow from this question: do people feel appreciated? This book will help you answer “Yes!”

Bringing Out the Best in People: How to Apply the Astonishing Power of Positive Reinforcement

By Aubrey C. Daniels

The classic bestseller on performance management is updated to reflect changes in today’s working environment. When an employer needs to know how to gain maximum performance from employees, renowned behavioral psychologist–Aubrey Daniels is the man to consult. What has made Daniels the man with the answers? His ability to apply scientifically based behavioral stimuli to the workplace while making it fun at the same time. Now Daniels updates his ground-breaking book with the latest and best motivational methods, perfected at such companies as Xerox, 3M, and Kodak. All-new material shows how to: create effective recognition and rewards systems in line with today’s employees want; Stimulate innovations and creativity in new and exciting ways; overcome problems associated with poorly educated workers; motivate young employees from the minute they join the workforce.

One of the most inspiring and impactful books ever written, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has captivated readers for 25 years. It has transformed the lives of Presidents and CEOs, educators and parents— in short, millions of people of all ages and occupations.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?

Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas.

Dr. Harari also compels us to look ahead, because over the last few decades humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to design not only the world around us, but also ourselves. Where is this leading us, and what do we want to become?

The 3×5 Coach: A Practical Guide to Coaching Your Team for Greater Results and Happier People

By Dave Baney

Whether you’re an executive officer, a department manager, or a shift supervisor, you have a clear understanding of your team members’ top accountabilities. Without clear communication, your team may not share that understanding. They may have entirely different views on their job responsibilities and even why they’re getting paid. This disconnect between managerial and staff opinions can devastate productivity, performance, and team morale. In The 3 x 5 Coach, market strategist and leadership expert Dave Baney offers a simple, direct solution to this problem. Baney’s effective methodology helps supervisors and employees quickly agree on key job accountabilities while establishing objective systems for evaluating employee performance and growth. Simply put, everyone will know why they’re getting paid and what they must do to continue to meet and exceed their job requirements. Baney’s effective coaching system encourages collaboration between supervisors and staff. His methodology and tools are simple enough to use immediately and robust enough to scale up as your company or department evolves. You already hold employees accountable for their actions—now you can align their expectations with your own. It all starts with a blank 3 x 5 card.

FORTUNE The Greatest Business Decisions of All Time: How Apple, Ford, IBM, Zappos, and others made radical choices that changed the course of business.

By Verne Harnish

Decisions equal success-nothing happens until one is made. Businesses make millions of decisions every day. But once in a great while a leader makes a truly game-changing decision that shifts not only the strategy of a single company but how everyone does business. These big decisions are counterintuitive-they go against the conventional wisdom. In hindsight, taking a different direction may seem easy, but these bet-the-company moves involve drama, doubt, and high tension.

Here management consultant Verne Harnish, the CEO of Gazelles, and Fortune’s editors provide the background stories behind the greatest business decisions of all time. In this fully original book, you’ll get a glimpse into the thought processes leading up to these groundbreaking moments and will learn how the decisions have shaped the thinking of today’s top leaders.

The Wisdom of Crowds

By James Surowiecki

In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about our world.

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful

By Marshall Goldsmith, Mark Reiter

America’s most sought-after executive coach shows how to climb the last few rungs of the ladder.
The corporate world is filled with executives, men and women who have worked hard for years to reach the upper levels of management. They’re intelligent, skilled, and even charismatic. But only a handful of them will ever reach the pinnacle — and as executive coach Marshall Goldsmith shows in this book, subtle nuances make all the difference. These are small “transactional flaws” performed by one person against another (as simple as not saying thank you enough), which lead to negative perceptions that can hold any executive back. Using Goldsmith’s straightforward, jargon-free advice, it’s amazingly easy behavior to change.

Executives who hire Goldsmith for one-on-one coaching pay $250,000 for the privilege. With this book, his help is available for 1/10,000th of the price.

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

By General Stanley McChrystal, David Silverman, Chris Fussell, Tatum Collins

In this powerful book, McChrystal and his colleagues show how the challenges they faced in Iraq can be rel­evant to countless businesses, nonprofits, and other or­ganizations. The world is changing faster than ever, and the smartest response for those in charge is to give small groups the freedom to experiment while driving every­one to share what they learn across the entire organiza­tion. As the authors argue through compelling examples, the team of teams strategy has worked everywhere from hospital emergency rooms to NASA. It has the potential to transform organizations large and small.

Developing the Leader Within You

The Traits of Leadership. Leadership is not an exclusiveclub for those who were born with it. The traits that are the raw materialsof leadership can be acquired. Link them up with desire, and nothing can keep youfrom becoming a leader.

The Difference Between Management and Leadership. Makingsure the work is done by others is the accomplishment of a manager. Inspiring othersto do better work is the accomplishment of a leader.

God has called every believer to influence others, to besalt and light. Developing the LeaderWithin You will equip you to improve your leadership and inspire others.

The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done

By Peter Drucker

The measure of the executive, Peter F. Drucker reminds us, is the ability to “get the right things done.” This usually involves doing what other people have overlooked as well as avoiding what is unproductive. Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that mold them into results.

Drucker identifies five practices essential to business effectiveness that can, and must, be learned:
Managing time
Choosing what to contribute to the organization
Knowing where and how to mobilize strength for best effect
Setting the right priorities
Knitting all of them together with effective decision-making
Ranging widely through the annals of business and government, Peter F. Drucker demonstrates the distinctive skill of the executive and offers fresh insights into old and seemingly obvious business situations.

The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster: Why Now Is the Time to #JoinTheRide

By Darren Hardy

The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster: Why Now Is The Time To #JoinTheRide, will prepare you for the wild ride of entrepreneurship. It will warn you (of forthcoming fears, doubts, and the self-defeating conditioning of your upbringing and past), inoculate you (from the naysayers, dream-stealers, and pains of rejection and failure), and guide you (as you build those under-developed skills of independence, self-motivation, and self-accountability) safely past the landmines that blow up and cause the failure of 66 percent of all new businesses.

You will learn the best strategies Darren has ever collected from the most successful people on the planet, covering the four essential skills necessary for entrepreneurial success: Sales, Recruiting, Leadership, and Productivity.

The Dream Manager

By Matthew Kelly

The fictional company in this remarkable book is grappling with real problems of high turnover and low morale — so the managers begin to investigate what really drives the employees. What they discover is that the key to motivation isnt necessarily the promise of a bigger paycheck or title, but rather the fulfillment of crucial personal dreams. They also learned that people at every level need to be offered specific kinds of help and encouragement — or our dreams will forever remain just dreams as we grow dissatisfied with our lives and jobs.

Beginning with his important thought that a company can only become the-best-version-of-itself to the extent that its employees are becoming better-versions-of-themselves, Matthew Kelly explores the connection between the dreams we are chasing personally and the way we all engage at work. Tackling head-on the growing problem of employee disengagement, Kelly explores the dynamic collaboration that is unleashed when people work together to achieve company objectives and personal dreams.

The power of The Dream Manager is that simply becoming aware of the concept will change the way you manage and relate to people instantly and forever. Whats your dream?

The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace: Empowering Organizations by Encouraging People

This book will give you the tools to improve staff morale, create a more positive workplace, and increase employee engagement. How? By teaching you to effectively communicate authentic appreciation and encouragement to employees, co-workers, and leaders. Most relational problems in organizations flow from this question: do people feel appreciated? This book will help you answer “Yes!”

QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability at Work and in Life

By John G. Miller

QBQ! The Question Behind the Question, already a phenomenon in its self-published edition, addresses the most important issue in business and society today: personal accountability.

The lack of personal accountability has resulted in an epidemic of blame, complaining, and procrastination. No organization-or individual-can achieve goals, compete in the marketplace, fulfill a vision, or develop people and teams without personal accountability.

Giftology: The Art and Science of Using Gifts to Cut Through the Noise, Increase Referrals, and Strengthen Client Retention

By John Ruhlin

Does it feel like you work in a “red ocean filled with sharks?” Eat or be eaten. Fierce competition. Continual battling over scarce resources.

What if there was another path? What if you could create your own blue oasis where profits are higher, marketing is as natural as breathing, and competition is nearly nonexistent? This nirvana can be a reality when you practice the principles of Giftology.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

By Nir Eyal

Why do some products capture widespread attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of sheer habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us?

Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) by explaining the Hook Model—a four-step process embedded into the products of many successful companies to subtly encourage customer behavior. Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.

Secret Service reveals the hidden systems of the few exceptional companies that do: what actions they take behind the scenes to consistently surpass customer expectations. These organizations reap the benefits of greater customer loyalty, exponentially expanded referral networks, lower employee turnover, and stronger bottom-line results. By quantifying and examining each phase of the “”Customer Experience Cycle,”” Secret Service reveals clever, practical ideas that can be transformed into repeatable best practices in any organization and at every level. Packed with examples applicable to a wide range of industries, this book provides practical, realistic ways to: * Turn customer complaints into positive experiences * Use marketing to go deeper with existing customers * Increase customer and employee retention, and turn bland customer service into truly memorable customer experiences”

Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

By Anne Morriss, Frances Frei

In Uncommon Service, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss show how, in a volatile economy where the old rules of strategic advantage no longer hold true, service must become a competitive weapon, not a damage-control function. That means weaving service tightly into every core decision your company makes.

Practical and engaging, Uncommon Service makes a powerful case for a new and systematic approach to service as a means of boosting productivity, profitability, and competitive advantage.

Fred 2.0: New Ideas on How to Keep Delivering Extraordinary Results

By Mark Sanborn

Nine years ago, bestselling author and business consultant Mark Sanborn introduced the world to Fred, his postman, who delivered extraordinary service in simple but remarkable ways. Fred’s story inspired millions. Companies―even, cities―were inspired to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary each day.

Today, with stiff competition from the networked global economy, delivering extraordinary results is more important than ever. With Fred 2.0, Mark not only revisits the original Fred to gain new insights, but also equips all of us with new strategies to achieve more. You’ll not only be inspired by Fred 2.0, you’ll also have the tools and strategies to aim higher and achieve the extraordinary.

The Fred Factor: How Passion in Your Work and Life Can Turn the Ordinary into the Extraordinary

By Mark Sanborn

In his powerful new book The Fred Factor, motivational speaker Mark Sanborn recounts the true story of Fred, the mail carrier who passionately loves his job and who genuinely cares about the people he serves. Because of that, he is constantly going the extra mile handling the mail – and sometimes watching over the houses – of the people on his route, treating everyone he meets as a friend. Where others might see delivering mail as monotonous drudgery, Fred sees an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of those he serves.

In The Fred Factor, Mark Sanborn illuminates the simple steps each of us can take to transform our own lives from the ordinary – into the extraordinary. Sanborn, through stories about Fred and others like him, reveals the four basic principles that will help us bring fresh energy and creativity to our life and work: how to make a real difference everyday, how to become more successful by building strong relationships, how to create real value for others without spending a penny, and how to constantly reinvent yourself.

Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service

By Performance Research Associates

the go-to guide on providing the kind of outstanding service that keeps customers coming back, the fifth edition combines powerful tools and techniques with real-world examples and all-new chapters on using social media for communication and service recovery, owning service encounters, responding positively to negative feedback, and more. The book provides readers with proven tips and strategies for: * Exceeding customer needs and expectations * Determining the right times to bend or break the rules * Becoming fantastic fixers and powerful problem-solvers * Using the RATER factors to wow your customers * Understanding cultural and generational differences * Becoming a listening post * Coping effectively with “customers from hell” With people surrounded by more choices and information than ever before, true customer loyalty has become increasingly difficult to attain. Combining timeless wisdom and up-to-the-minute methods, Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service is the book no customer service professional can afford to be without.

Fish: A Proven Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results

By Stephen Lundin, Harry Paul, John Christensen

In this engrossing parable, a fictional manager is charged with the responsibility of turning a chronically unenthusiastic and unhelpful department into an effective team. Across the street from her office is Seattle’s very real Pike Place Fish Market, world famous and wildly successful thanks to its fun, bustling, joyful atmosphere and customer service. By applying ingeniously simple lessons learned from the actual Pike Place fishmongers, our manager learns how to energize those who report to her and effect an astonishing transformation in her workplace.

Addressing todays work issues (including employee retention and burnout) with an engaging metaphor and an appealing message that applies to any sector of any organization, Fish! offers wisdom that is easy to grasp, instantly applicable, and profound–the hallmarks of a true business classic. Based on a bestselling ChartHouse training video which has been adopted by corporations including Southwest Airlines, Sprint, and Nordstrom.

Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy

By Isadore Sharp

How did a child of immigrants, starting with no background in the hotel business, create the world’s most admired and successful hotel brand? And how has Four Seasons grown so dramatically, over nearly half a century, without losing its focus on exceptional quality and unparalleled service?
Isadore Sharp answers these questions in his inspiring memoir. He started out in Toronto, the son of a modest builder from Poland, but ambition and fate rapidly took him beyond his father’s three-man construction business.

Sharp learned the hotel business by trial and error. His breakthrough was a vision for a new kind of hotel, featuring superior design, top-quality amenities, and, above all, a deep commitment to service. Today, Four Seasons is widely recognized as the world leader in comfort and luxury—in fact, it sets the standard by which every luxury hotel is measured.

Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness

By Jeffrey Gitomer

Salespeople hate to read. That’s why Little Red Book of Selling is short, sweet, and to the point. It’s packed with answers that people are searching for in order to help them make sales for the moment—and the rest of their lives.

Purple Cow, New Edition: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable–Includes new bonus chapter

By Seth Godin

What do Starbucks and JetBlue and KrispyKreme and Apple and DutchBoy and Kensington and Zespri and Hard Candy have that you don’t? How do they continue to confound critics and achieve spectacular growth, leaving behind former tried-and true brands to gasp their last?

Face it, the checklist of tired ‘P’s marketers have used for decades to get their product noticed -Pricing, Promotion, Publicity, to name a few-aren’t working anymore. There’s an exceptionally important ‘P’ that has to be added to the list. It’s Purple Cow.

Principle-Centered Leadership

By Stephen R. Covey

How do we as individuals and organizations survive and thrive amid tremendous change? Why are efforts to improve falling so short in real results despite the millions of dollars in time, capital, and human effort being spent on them? How do we unleash the creativity, talent, and energy within ourselves and others in the midst of pressure? Is it realistic to believe that balance among personal, family, and professional life is possible? Stephen R. Covey demonstrates that the answer to these and other dilemmas is Principle-Centered Leadership, a long-term, inside-out approach to developing people and organizations.

Jeffrey Gitomer’s 21.5 Unbreakable Laws of Selling: Proven Actions You Must Take to Make Easier, Faster, Bigger Sales….Now and Forever

By Jeffrey Gitomer

There are universal laws of selling that determine whether you succeed, or don’t succeed — whether you earn enough to enjoy the lifestyle you want or struggle to make ends meet. When you align the wind with your sails, you move effortlessly across the water. When your sails are out of alignment, you flounder and go nowhere. If you align your thinking and actions with these powerful laws of selling, you will be more effective and efficient. You will encounter less friction, require less energy, and get bigger results faster.

The Little Book of Leadership: The 12.5 Strengths of Responsible, Reliable, Remarkable Leaders That Create Results, Rewards, and Resilience

By Jeffrey Gitomer

What makes a leader relevant? It’s not their place of employment, job title, experience, or status in life?it’s their resilience. The true measure of any leader is his or her ability to react based on past experience and gut feelings, respond in real time to current circumstances, and then to recover quickly and move on with new lessons learned. The Little Book of Leadership combines classic style with the latest innovations to challenges the reader to self-evaluate every facet of their leadership, coaching, and communication abilities in order to better formulate what actions can be taken to improve their natural skills. Ideas and answers are provided for every challenge.

Little Black Book of Connections: 6.5 Assets for Networking Your Way to Rich Relationships

By Jeffrey Gitomer

The Little Black Book of Connections is based on the power of give value first. It’s about how you can climb the ladder without stepping on people’s backs. It’s about how to earn the respect of a powerful mentor without begging. It’s about how to build stronger relationships with customers, bosses, co-workers, vendors, friends, and family. It’s about being in the same room with powerful people. It’s about how to connect and how to not connect. It’s about how to say the right things to the right people in the right circumstances to make the right impression.

Jeffrey Gitomer’s Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude: New Edition, Updated & Revised: How to Find, Build and Keep a YES! Attitude for a Lifetime of SUCCESS & HAPPINESS

By Jeffrey Gitomer

What makes this book for you? It’s not just inspiration: it’s a complete, step-by-step, fully-integrated game plan for understanding and mastering your attitude. You’ll learn the 7.5 specific things you can do to maintain your intensity, drive, and commitment… discover 20.5 attitude gems that capture the value of thousands of dollars of books and courses… learn how to overcome the 10.5 most dangerous attitude busters … then learn how to maintain your YES! Attitude every day, for the rest of your life! Don’t just read this book once: study it, live it — and win.

Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service

By Ken Blanchard

This, in a nutshell, is the advice given to a new Area Manager on his first day–in an extraordinary business book that will help everyone, in every kind of organization or business, deliver stunning customer service and achieve miraculous bottom-line results.

Written in the parable style of The One Minute Manager, Raving Fans uses a brilliantly simple and charming story to teach how to define a vision, learn what a customer really wants, institute effective systems, and make Raving Fan Service a constant feature–not just another program of the month.

America is in the midst of a service crisis that has left a wake of disillusioned customers from coast to coast. Raving Fans includes startling new tips and innovative techniques that can help anyone create a revolution in any workplace–and turn their customers into raving, spending fans.

The Sales Bible, New Edition: The Ultimate Sales Resource

By Jeffrey Gitomer

The Sales Bible is your personal, trusted, authoritativeresource to reach your sales potential and shine like a star.Accept no substitutes. Here are a few highlights:

The 10.5 Commandments of Selling
Generate leads and close sales in any market environment
Find 25 proven ways to set hard-to-get appointments
Use top-down selling to fill your sales pipeline with prospectswho are ready to buy now
Ask the right questions to make more sales in half thetime
How to use the top social media platforms to create inboundleads and prove value
The Sales Bible has helped tens of thousands ofsalespeople all over the world reach their potential and close thedeal — and it can help you. So what are you waiting for?

The Sales Playbook: for Hyper Sales Growth

By Jack Daly

As a salesperson, how much time do you spend learning proven sales techniques from your company’s Top Producers? How much time do you spend practicing those techniques in-house, refining them with other team members before taking your final, polished approach on the road? And how much time each day or week does your Sales Manager spend helping you develop those high-performing techniques and processes?Same question for you, Sales Managers: How much of your day or week is dedicated to growing your sales team? How much time do you spend teaching or arranging for the mentoring or practicing of proven sales techniques? Are you teaching your salespeople how to fish, or are you just telling them how many fish they need to bring in to meet quota?In The Sales Playbook for Hyper Sales Growth, we not only delve into the necessity of developing these processes within a company but also provide valuable techniques, tools, and procedures that sales teams can begin implementing immediately.

Digital Marketing in the Zone: The Ultimate System for Digital Marketing Success

By David Reske

In this age of marketing complexity, some marketers have risen above the fray and are accelerating the results of their digital marketing campaigns. They have a complete view of the market and their place in it, and have developed strategies and plans that work. They are not confused at all about the types of campaigns that are available, and they have complete confidence in the ads, messages, offers, and content they are producing.

Most marketers, however, don’t live life this way. They struggle with their campaigns and live in a perpetual state of confusion, wishful thinking, and risk-taking. Along with their professional frustrations, they experience negative emotions and are never totally happy with their work.

Digital Marketing in the Zone breaks through the clutter and provides a clear blueprint to enable marketers to be confident and successful in Digital Marketing.

SPIN Selling

By Neil Rackham

n SPIN Selling, Rackham, who has advised leading companies such as IBM and Honeywell delivers the first book to specifically examine selling high-value product and services. By following the simple, practical, and easy-to-apply techniques of SPIN, readers will be able to dramatically increase their sales volume from major accounts. Rackham answers key questions such as “What makes success in major sales” and “Why do techniques like closing work in small sales but fail in larger ones?”

You will learn why traditional sales methods which were developed for small consumer sales, just won’t work for large sales and why conventional selling methods are doomed to fail in major sales. Packed with real-world examples, illuminating graphics, and informative case studies – and backed by hard research data – SPIN Selling is the million-dollar key to understanding and producing record-breaking high-end sales performance.

The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World

By Fred Reichheld

In this thoroughly updated and expanded edition, Reichheld, with Bain colleague Rob Markey, explains how practitioners have built Net Promoter into a full-fledged management system that drives extraordinary financial and competitive results. With his trademark clarity, Reichheld:

• Defines the fundamental concept of Net Promoter, explaining its connection to your company’s growth and sustained success
• Presents the closed-loop feedback process and demonstrates its power to energize employees and delight customers
• Shares new and compelling stories of companies that have transformed their performance by putting Net Promoter at the center of their business

Practical and insightful, The Ultimate Question 2.0 provides a blueprint for long-term growth and success.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, Newsjacking, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly

By David Meerman Scott

In the latest edition of this pioneering guide to the future of marketing, you’ll get a step-by-step action plan for leveraging the power of the latest approaches to generating attention for your idea or your business. You’ll learn how get the right information to the right people at the right time—at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising.

The Internet continues to change the way people communicate and interact with each other, and if you’re struggling to keep up with what’s trending in social media, online videos, apps, blogs, or more, your product or service is bound to get lost in the ether. In The New Rules of Marketing & PR, you’ll get access to the tried-and-true rules that will keep you ahead of the curve when using the latest and greatest digital spaces to their fullest PR, marketing, and customer-communications potential. Keeping in mind that your audience is savvy and crunched for time, this essential guide shows you how to cut through the online clutter to ensure that your message gets seen and heard.

The Customer-Funded Business: Start, Finance, or Grow Your Company with Your Customers’ Cash

By John Mullins

In The Customer Funded Business, best-selling author John Mullins uncovers five novel approaches that scrappy and innovative 21st century entrepreneurs working in companies large and smallhave ingeniously adapted from their predecessors like Dell, Gates,and the Zieglers.

Through the captivating stories of these and other inspiring companies from around the world, Mullins brings to life the fivemodels and identifies the questions that angel or other investors will – and should! – ask of entrepreneurs or corporate innovators seeking to apply them. Drawing on in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs and investors who have actually put these models to use, Mullins goes on to address the key implementation issues that characterize each of the models: when to apply them, how best to apply them, and the pitfalls to watch out for.

The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)

By Seth Godin

Every new project (or job, or hobby, or company) starts out fun…then gets really hard, and not much fun at all. You might be in a Dip—a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing. But maybe it’s really a Cul-de-Sac—a total dead end. What really sets superstars apart is the ability to tell the two apart.

Winners seek out the Dip. They realize that the bigger the barrier, the bigger the reward for getting past it. If you can beat the Dip to be the best, you’ll earn profits, glory, and long-term security.
Whether you’re an intern or a CEO, this fun little book will help you figure out if you’re in a Dip that’s worthy of your time, effort, and talents. The old saying is wrong—winners do quit, and quitters do win.

Free the Idea Monkey to Focus on What Matters Most: How the Most Successful People Make Big Ideas Happen

By G Michael Maddock, Raphael Louis Viton

In a series of short (extremely entertaining) chapters, Free the Idea Monkey…to focus on what matters most! shows how the most innovative leaders and organizations work and play to find the proper balance between its divergent and convergent thinkers–between the Idea Monkeys and (Ring)leaders. That’s the secret, and it’s what creates real progress. Just think about the founding of Disney. Walt Disney partnered with his brother, Roy Disney. (Walt handled the Imagineering; Roy made sure they made money at it.) Examples of these kinds of partnerships are endless: Orville and Wilbur Wright; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; Paul Allen and Bill Gates.

Free the Idea Monkey…to focus on what matters most! is filled with true stories, practical tips and illustrations–all designed to show you how to create these types of profitable partnerships in life and in business. Written by the proven entrepreneurs who are leading a globally recognized innovation agency, this book can help any company, manager or creative person become more effective.

The Very Little but Very Powerful Book on Closing: Ask the Right Questions, Transfer the Value, Create the Urgency, and Win the Sale

By Jeffrey Gitomer

A leading authority on sales and customer service reveals how to close the deal on your terms.

This powerful book shows you new perspectives on closing that builds relationships, creates partnerships, and allows you to win your price on your terms.

The Very Little But Very Powerful Book on Closing is a great tool to help you ask effective closing questions, create urgency, and find your winning formula. With this book as your guide, you’ll master closing the sale in just five steps.

• Packed with insights grounded in real world experience from the bestselling author of The Sales Bible and The Little Book of Leadership

• Contains essential advice from the leading authority in sales and customer service

The Great Game of Business, Expanded and Updated: The Only Sensible Way to Run a Company

By Jack Stack

The revised and updated edition of The Great Game of Business lays out an entirely different way of running a company. It wasn’t dreamed up in an executive think tank or an Ivy League business school or around the conference table by big-time consultants. It was forged on the factory floors of the heartland by ordinary folks hoping to figure out how to save their jobs when their parent company, International Harvester, went down the tubes.

Ownership Thinking: How to End Entitlement and Create a Culture of Accountability, Purpose, and Profit

By Brad Hams

It’s an insidious disease that is crippling companies, destroying our economy, and crushing potential. It’s infecting the very roots of business performance, and it’s spreading fast. It isn’t the recession, market volatility, scandal, or greed.

It’s entitlement.
And it may be killing your business.

In myriad ways, entitlement has been cultivated for decades. As a result, too many employees today believe that they are entitled to a paycheck simply because they show up. Brad Hams has proven that we are not doomed to a path of entitlement and dependence. After more than 15 years working with hundreds of companies, he knows that the vast majority of employees addicted to entitlement actually want to engage, want to contribute, and feel much better about themselves when they are in an environment that requires them to do so.

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (Harper Business Essentials)

By Jim Collins

Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies and studied each in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. They examined the companies from their very beginnings to the present day — as start-ups, as midsize companies, and as large corporations. Throughout, the authors asked: “What makes the truly exceptional companies different from the comparison companies and what were the common practices these enduringly great companies followed throughout their history?”

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t

The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:

Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.

The Hedgehog Concept: (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.

A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.

The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.

Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck–Why Some Thrive Despite Them All

By Jim Collins

Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns withanother groundbreaking work, this time to ask: why do some companies thrive inuncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research,buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins andhis colleague Morten Hansen enumerate the principles for building a truly greatenterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous and fast-moving times. This book isclassic Collins: contrarian, data-driven and uplifting.

Take the mystery out of small business finance with this no-frills guide to understanding the numbers that will guide your business out of any financial black hole. Author Greg Crabtree, a successful accountant, small business advisor, and popular presenter, shows you how to use your firm’s key financial indicators as a basis for smart business decisions as you grow your firm from startup to $5 million (and, more!) in annual revenue.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

By Daniel H. Pink

Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

By John Warrillow

The lifeblood of your business is repeat customers. But customers can be fickle, markets shift, and competitors are ruthless. So how do you ensure a steady flow of repeat business? The secret—no matter what industry you’re in—is finding and keeping automatic customers.

Get A Grip: How to Get Everything You Want from Your Entrepreneurial Business

By Gino Wickman

With characters and situations created from collective business experiences and stories, Get A Grip is a fable that will ring true for entrepreneurial leaders the world over and guide them to get their companies on track.

Give A Damn!: Individually we make a difference, Collectively we change the world!

By Mr. Mark S. Lewis

Our own actions, individually and collectively, determine the world in which we live. The mindset of today’s society has deteriorated because we don’t GIVE A DAMN about each other (except for those we really care about). Everything seems to be internally driven and we justify our actions and behaviors, whether right or wrong. As a society, we have become more self-centered, ego and excuse driven, selfish, entitled, violent and more complacent that ever before. Responsibility, accountability and doing the right thing seem more the exception than the rule. And society is killing itself. The solution? To GIVE A DAMN for each other…. every second, minute, hour and day. This book identifies the problems with today’s society, and how a GIVE A DAMN behavioral philosophy can fix the situation.

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

By Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Written in a fast-paced thriller style, The Goal, a gripping novel, is transforming management thinking throughout the world. It contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas, which underline the Theory of Constraints (TOC), developed by Eli Goldratt.

One of Eli Goldratt s convictions was that the goal of an individual or an organization should not be defined in absolute terms. A good definition of a goal is one that sets us on a path of ongoing improvement.
Pursuing such a goal necessitates more than one breakthrough. In fact it requires many. To be in a position to identify these breakthroughs we should have a deep understanding of the underlying rules of our environment.

HBR’s 10 Must Reads On Strategy

By Harvard Business Review

If you read nothing else on strategy, read these 10 articles. We’ve combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you catalyze your organization’s strategy development and execution.

Idea to Execution: How to Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything in Your Business

By Ari Meisel

Ari Meisel and Nick Sonnenberg recently launched a profitable Virtual Assistant (VA) business in just one day – challenging the startup mentality that every new venture requires months of planning and a large investment of capital. Their VA business was born from scribbled notes on a cocktail napkin during dinner and was an up-and-running less than 24 hours later. By following their 3 step process: Optimize, Automate, Outsource, they leveraged free, readily available digital tools and apps with no outlay of cash whatsoever. Meisel and Sonnenberg reveal tactics for building a scalable business in today’s world. This fascinating and informative book chronicles their first year in business together. An essential read for any entrepreneur. It follows their journey from idea to execution, detailing a bold new approach to 21st century business based on a fearless ingenuity and a willingness to rewrite the rules.

The Inside Advantage: The Strategy that Unlocks the Hidden Growth in Your Business

By Robert Bloom

Robert H. Bloom has discovered that every enterprise has at least one strategic asset-one existing strength-that can form the foundation for future growth. He calls this an Inside Advantage. This strength usually lies unrecognized in an activity the business is currently performing or in a concept or an idea that the business already owns. Finding this hidden potential and becoming well known for it will grow the business.
Doing what you’re good at and doing it better than anyone else will create growth. The Inside Advantage will help you capture that magic moment when customers will select your product or service over those of your competitors.

Jobs to Be Done: A Roadmap for Customer-Centered Innovation

By Stephen Wunker

Sifting through purchasing data for clues about what might sell or haphazardly brainstorming ideas are typical strategies. But Jobs to Be Done offers a far more precise and effective approach: determining the drivers of customer behavior–those functional and emotional goals that people want to achieve. Using the Jobs method, it becomes easy to see that people don’t really need a 1/4-inch drill bit, but a 1/4-inch hole. They’re not just buying ice cream, but also celebration, bonding, and indulgence.

This simple shift in perspective opens up new insights about your customers and a wealth of hidden opportunities. Social media newcomer Snapchat, for example, used the Jobs process to capture the millennial demographic. By reducing functionality, the company satisfied its users’ unmet need to document real life, in the moment, without filters and “like” buttons.

Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs – in companies of all sizes – a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

By Chip Heath

In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the human scale principle, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating curiosity gaps. Along the way, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds—from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony—draw their power from the same six traits.
Made to Stick will transform the way you communicate.

Multipliers, Revised and Updated: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

By Liz Wiseman

In this engaging and highly practical book, leadership expert Liz Wiseman explores two leadership styles (Multipliers and Diminishers), persuasively showing how Multipliers can have a resoundingly positive and profitable effect on organizations—getting more done with fewer resources, developing and attracting talent, and cultivating new ideas and energy to drive organizational change and innovation.

In analyzing data from more than 150 leaders, Wiseman has identified five disciplines that distinguish Multipliers from Diminishers. These five disciplines are not based on innate talent; indeed, they are skills and practices that everyone can learn to use—even lifelong and recalcitrant Diminishers. Lively, real-world case studies and practical tips and techniques bring to life each of these principles, showing you how to become a Multiplier too, whether you are a new or an experienced manager. This revered classic has been updated with new examples of Multipliers, as well as two new chapters one on accidental Diminishers, and one on how to deal with Diminishers.

Just imagine what you could accomplish if you could harness all the energy and intelligence around you. Multipliers will show you how.

Nuts!: Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success

By Kevin Freiberg

With unlimited access to the people and inside documents of Southwest Airlines, authors Kevin and Jackie Freiberg share the secrets behind the greatest success story in commercial aviation. Read it and discover how to transfer the Southwest inspiration to your own business and personal life.

Outliers: The Story of Success

By Malcolm Galdwell

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers”–the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?

His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.

Brilliant and entertaining, Outliers is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.

The Outsiders

By S.E. Hinton

No one ever said life was easy. But Ponyboy is pretty sure that he’s got things figured out. He knows that he can count on his brothers, Darry and Sodapop. And he knows that he can count on his friends—true friends who would do anything for him, like Johnny and Two-Bit. But not on much else besides trouble with the Socs, a vicious gang of rich kids whose idea of a good time is beating up on “greasers” like Ponyboy. At least he knows what to expect—until the night someone takes things too far.

The Outsiders is a dramatic and enduring work of fiction that laid the groundwork for the YA genre. S. E. Hinton’s classic story of a boy who finds himself on the outskirts of regular society remains as powerful today as it was the day it was first published.

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success

By William N. Thorndike

In this refreshing, counterintuitive book, author Will Thorndike brings to bear the analytical wisdom of a successful career in investing, closely evaluating the performance of companies and their leaders. You will meet eight individualistic CEOs whose firms’ average returns outperformed the S&P 500 by a factor of twenty—in other words, an investment of $10,000 with each of these CEOs, on average, would have been worth over $1.5 million twenty-five years later. You may not know all their names, but you will recognize their companies: General Cinema, Ralston Purina, The Washington Post Company, Berkshire Hathaway, General Dynamics, Capital Cities Broadcasting, TCI, and Teledyne. In The Outsiders, you’ll learn the traits and methods—striking for their consistency and relentless rationality—that helped these unique leaders achieve such exceptional performance.

Outthink the Competition: How a New Generation of Strategists Sees Options Others Ignore

By Kaihan Krippendorff

“Outthinkers” are entrepreneurs and corporate leaders with a newplaybook. They see opportunities others ignore, challenge dogmaothers accept as truth, rally resources others cannot influence,and unleash new strategies that disrupt their markets. Outthinkthe Competition proves that business competition is undergoinga fundamental paradigm shift and that during such revolutions,outthinkers beat traditionalists.

Outthink the Competition presents stories of breakthroughcompanies like Apple, Google, Vistaprint, and Rosetta Stone whosestunning performances defy traditional explanation and will inspirereaders to outthink the competition. Core concepts in the bookinclude:

Discover the Eight Dimensions of Disruption
Learn to play by the Outthinker Playbook
Develop the Five Habits of the Outthinker
Implement the Outthinker Process
It’s time to buck tradition in order to stay ahead. Outthink thecompetition and uncover opportunities hiding in plain sight.

The Oz Principle: Getting Results Through Individual and Organizational Accountability

By Rogers Connors

Since it was originally published in 1994, The Oz Principle has sold nearly 600,000 copies and become the worldwide bible on accountability. Through its practical and invaluable advice, thousands of companies have learned just how vital personal and organizational accountability is for a company to achieve and maintain its best results.

At the core of the authors’ message is the idea that when people take personal ownership of their organization’s goals and accept responsibility for their own performance, they become more invested and work at a higher level to ensure not only their own success, but everyone’s. Now more than ever, The Oz Principle is vital to anyone charged with obtaining results. It is a must have, must read, and must apply classic business book.

Peter Drucker’s Five Most Important Questions: Enduring Wisdom for Today’s Leaders

By Peter F. Drucker

Peter Drucker’s Five Most Important Questions providesinsightful guidance and stirring inspiration for today’s leadersand entrepreneurs. By applying Drucker’s leadership framework inthe present context of today’s leaders and those who lead withthem, this book is an essential resource for people leading,managing and working in all three sectors—public, private andsocial. Readers will gain new perspectives and develop a solidfoundation upon which to build a successful and bright future. Theywill learn how to focus on why they are doing what they’re doing,how to do it better, and how to develop a realistic, motivationalplan for achieving their goals.

Phillips’ Treasury of Humorous Quotations

By Bob Phillips

Phillips’ Treasury of Humorous Quotations is a catalog of more than 1,700 famous (and not so famous) sayings on life. This book is designed to be a ready reference for seminar and sermon preparation, and it’s just plain entertaining. Inside you’ll find entirely new material. Bob draws from a variety of resources throughout history that are sure to give writers, educators, ministers, and public speakers the perfect quote for their speech or paper.

Porter’s Five Forces: Stay ahead of the competition

This book is a practical and accessible guide to understanding and implementing Porter’s five forces, providing you with the essential information and saving time.

In 50 minutes you will be able to:

* Understand the five forces that affect profitability and analyze each force in depth in relation to your company
* Analyze the intensity of the competition within an industry and how this affects your business
* Increase or maintain your competitive advantage according to the analysis

Boring Meetings Suck: Get More Out of Your Meetings, or Get Out of More Meetings

By Jon Petz

The guide that proves your meetings don’t have to suck!
There’s a big dull elephant in the boardroom: this meeting! Most of the millions of meetings held in the world today are a monumental waste of time and talent. Worse still, most of the so-called solutions and books for boring meetings are twice as boring.

Boring Meetings Suck provides tips and tactics to deliver”Get-In, Get-It-Done, or Get-Out” style meetings, while also tackling what most prefer to avoid; that you don’t have to BE in charge of a meeting to TAKE charge of a meeting. This entertaining and take-no-prisoners guide is full of easily deployed SRDs? Suckification Reduction Devices?that will help you make your next meeting both efficient and effective.

Empowers attendees to politely speak up and get a meeting back on track, or graciously get out, without being fired
Shows how hosts can capitalize on technology, learning to crowd-source problems and increase participation
Defines surefire methods to get meetings to start and end on time and not have the speaker read the slides
STOPS over-invitation syndrome
The author has appeared before many major corporate clients, and was named a “Top Business Professional Under 40” by AmericanCity Business Journals
Your meetings do not have to bore, nor must they suck. Instead, get the winning techniques in Boring Meetings Suck, and make your meetings awesome in their engagement and productivity, or stop having them!

Creating Competitive Advantage: Give Customers a Reason to Choose You Over Your Competitors

By Jaynie L. Smith

Why should I do business with you… and not your competitor?
Whether you are a retailer, manufacturer, distributor, or service provider – if you cannot answer this question, you are surely losing customers, clients and market share. This eye-opening book reveals how identifying your competitive advantages (and trumpeting them to the marketplace) is the most surefire way to close deals, retain clients, and stay miles ahead of the competition.

The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

By Richard Koch

How anyone can be more effective with less effort by learning how to identify and leverage the 80/20 principle–the well-known, unpublicized secret that 80 percent of all our results in business and in life stem from a mere 20 percent of our efforts.

The 80/20 principle is one of the great secrets of highly effective people and organizations.

Did you know, for example, that 20 percent of customers account for 80 percent of revenues? That 20 percent of our time accounts for 80 percent of the work we accomplish? The 80/20 Principle shows how we can achieve much more with much less effort, time, and resources, simply by identifying and focusing our efforts on the 20 percent that really counts. Although the 80/20 principle has long influenced today’s business world, author Richard Koch reveals how the principle works and shows how we can use it in a systematic and practical way to vastly increase our effectiveness, and improve our careers and our companies.

The unspoken corollary to the 80/20 principle is that little of what we spend our time on actually counts. But by concentrating on those things that do, we can unlock the enormous potential of the magic 20 percent, and transform our effectiveness in our jobs, our careers, our businesses, and our lives.

Every business is on an adventure leading to absolute victory or demise. If
you want to achieve an Epic Win with your business, you must define and
execute the right plan to crush your competition―what Robert Fish calls a
“BreakAway Move.”
As founder and CEO of the business-services company Insight CXO,
Robert understands how hypergrowth companies break away from the
pack and achieve wild success. In The BreakAway Move, he shares the
strategies and techniques you can utilize to lead your company to an Epic
Win. Designed for small to midmarket companies, Robert’s method is
divided into three parts:
1. Creating Your Strong Core―the foundation that you build and grow
your business on.
2. Creating and Selecting Your BreakAway Moves―the strategies you
implement that separates you from the pack.
3. Crushing the Competition―how you make your BreakAway Moves
stick.
By discovering and achieving the right benchmarks, you can command your
industry and triumph!

Rock & Sand: A Practical Insight to Business Growth

By Michael Synk

Using the simple visual analogy of “moving rocks” and “pushing sand” the author creates a model that helps business owners, executives, and entrepreneurs understand the connection between strategy and execution while giving guidance on what to do about it. It’s easy to follow, compelling, and very practical. Better yet, readers won’t get caught up in case studies or examples that are interesting but not applicable to their situation. Rock & Sand takes business strategy and execution down to it’s essence and links them together. The “Rock and Sand” model challenges the “myth” of strategic complexity and simplifies its execution, paving the way to business growth. It’s a book that is long overdue. Rock & Sand takes business strategy and execution down to it’s essence and links them together. The “Rock and Sand” model challenges the “myth” of strategic complexity and simplifies its execution, paving the way to business growth.

Running Meetings

By Harvard Business Review

Don’t have much time? Get up to speed fast on the most essential business skills with HBR’s 20-Minute Manager series. Whether you need a crash course or a brief refresher, each book in the series is a concise, practical primer that will help you brush up on a key management topic. Advice you can quickly read and apply, for ambitious professionals and aspiring executives–from the most trusted source in business. Also available as an ebook.

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers

By Alexander Osterwalder

Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow’s enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don’t yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation.
Co-created by 470 “Business Model Canvas” practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model–or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you’ll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition.

Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you’re ready to change the rules, you belong to “the business model generation!”

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

By Jeff Sutherland, JJ Sutherland

If you’ve ever been startled by how fast the world is changing, Scrum is one of the reasons why. Productivity gains of as much as 1200% have been recorded, and there’s no more lucid – or compelling – explainer of Scrum and its bright promise than Jeff Sutherland, the man who put together the first Scrum team more than twenty years ago.

The thorny problem Jeff began tackling back then boils down to this: people are spectacularly bad at doing things with agility and efficiency. Best laid plans go up in smoke. Teams often work at cross purposes to each other. And when the pressure rises, unhappiness soars.

In this book you’ll journey to Scrum’s front lines where Jeff’s system of deep accountability, team interaction, and constant iterative improvement is, among other feats, bringing the FBI into the 21st century, perfecting the design of an affordable 140 mile per hour/100 mile per gallon car, helping NPR report fast-moving action in the Middle East, changing the way pharmacists interact with patients, reducing poverty in the Third World, and even helping people plan their weddings and accomplish weekend chores.

But the most important reason to read this book is that it may just help you achieve what others consider unachievable – whether it be inventing a trailblazing technology, devising a new system of education, pioneering a way to feed the hungry, or, closer to home, a building a foundation for your family to thrive and prosper.

Simplify: How the Best Businesses in the World Succeed

By Richard Koch

Investor and successful entrepreneur Richard Koch and venture capitalist Greg Lockwood have spent years researching what makes successful companies—such as IKEA, Apple, Uber, and Airbnb—achieve game-changing who status. The answer is simple: They Simplify.

Take the Stairs: 7 Steps to Achieving True Success

By Rory Vaden

How do successful people achieve results? In short, they do it the old-fashioned way, with focus and self-discipline. Popular speaker and strategist Rory Vaden presents a simple program for “taking the stairs”—that is, resisting the temptations of “quick fixes,” eliminating distractions, and transcending personal setbacks in order to reach your goals.

Whatever your vision of success is, this proven program will help you get there—one stair at a time.

Success: One Day at a Time

By John C. Maxwell

Success One Day At A Time is the kind of book you will want to carry in your car or place at the side of your bed. Each page contains a snapshot of the daily road of an overcomer. It is the perfect gift for the new graduate as well as anyone else who wants to become all that God intended! Owning a book by John Maxwell is like having your own personal trainer cheerleader. Drawing on over twenty years of experience in training leaders, John shares not only how to succeed but the biblical reason for doing so. “Success is knowing your purpose in life, sowing seeds that benefit others, and growing to your maximum potential,” he says. He asserts that success is for everyone. The secret of success is found in your daily routine, springing from your dreams, vision and consistent self-discipline.

Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

By W. Chan Kim

In this perennial bestseller, embraced by organizations and industries worldwide, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success. Recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written, Blue Ocean Strategy, now updated with fresh content from the authors, argues that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves (spanning more than 100 years across 30 industries), the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors but from creating “blue oceans”―untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.

Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any organization can use to create and capture their own blue oceans. This expanded edition includes:

A new preface by the authors: Help! My Ocean Is Turning Red
Updates on all cases and examples in the book, bringing their stories up to the present time
Two new chapters and an expanded third one ― Alignment, Renewal, and Red Ocean Traps ― that address the most pressing questions readers have asked over the past 10 years

Culture is Everything: The Story And System Of A Start-Up That Became Australia’s Best Place To Work

By Tristan White

How One Company Is Redefining The Meaning Of Going To Work

Tristan White’s story started like many others. He had a dream to
work in a job that inspired him. He didn’t find that job, so he created it.
In 2004, The Physio Co (TPC) was born with one team member: Tristan
White. In the thirteen years since, TPC has become a remarkable
healthcare success story based upon fast growth and a thriving,
systemized company culture.
Tristan’s obsession with creating an inspiring place to work for himself
and others has resulted in more than a decade of learning, testing and
refining. If you’ve ever wondered how to build and sustain a thriving
company culture, the Culture Is Everything system developed by
Tristan White and The Physio Co team is your answer.
The Physio Co story and Culture Is Everything system explained in this
book will give you the confidence and knowledge to create a strong
culture in your very own business or team.

Design to Grow: How Coca-Cola Learned to Combine Scale and Agility (and How You Can Too)

By David Butler & Linda Tischler

Expert advice from Coca-Cola’s Vice President of Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Learn how the world’s largest beverage brand uses design to grow its business by combining the advantages of a large-scale company with the agility of a nimble startup.

Every company needs both scale and agility to win. From a fledging startup in Nepal, to a century-old multinational in New York, scale and agility are two qualities that are essential to every company’s success. Start-ups understand agility. They know just when to pivot to stay alive. But what they haven’t mastered yet is how to stabilize their business model so they can move to the next stage and become full-fledged companies. And well-established companies know scale. They are successful because they know how to leverage size with a high degree of effectiveness and efficiency. But what worries them most is staying competitive in a world of increasing uncertainty and change, complicated by upstarts searching for ways to disrupt the industry. So what is the key to creating the kind of scale and agility necessary to stay competitive in this day and age? The answer is design.

In Design to Grow, a Coca-Cola senior executive shares both the successes and failures of one of the world’s largest companies as it learns to use design to be both agile and big. In this rare and unprecedented behind-the-scenes look, David Butler and senior Fast Company editor, Linda Tischler, use plain language and easy-to-understand case studies to show how this works at Coca-Cola—and how other companies can use the same approach to grow their business. This book is a must-read for managers inside large corporations as well as entrepreneurs just getting started.

The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management (Collins Business Essentials)

By Peter F. Drucker

Father of modern management, social commentator, and preeminent business philosopher, Peter F. Drucker analyzed economics and society for more than sixty years. Now for readers everywhere who are concerned with the ways that management practices and principles affect the performance of organizations, individuals, and society, there is The Essential Drucker—an invaluable compilation of essential materials from the works of a management legend.

Containing twenty-six core selections, The Essential Drucker covers the basic principles and concerns of management and its problems, challenges, and opportunities, giving managers, executives, and professionals the tools to perform the tasks that the economy and society of tomorrow will demand of them.

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence

By Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

In Prediction Machines, three eminent economists recast the rise of AI as a drop in the cost of prediction. With this single, masterful stroke, they lift the curtain on the AI-is-magic hype and show how basic tools from economics provide clarity about the AI revolution and a basis for action by CEOs, managers, policy makers, investors, and entrepreneurs.

Penetrating, fun, and always insightful and practical, Prediction Machines follows its inescapable logic to explain how to navigate the changes on the horizon. The impact of AI will be profound, but the economic framework for understanding it is surprisingly simple.

How Companies Win: Profiting from Demand-Driven Business Models No Matter What Business You’re In

By Rick Kash, David Calhoun

In a world of contracting markets and diminished consumer demand, The Cambridge Group founder Rick Kash and Nielsen Company CEO David Calhoun show companies how to find new customers and bigger profits. How Companies Win makes The Cambridge Group’s proprietary demand model—a strategy which multi-million dollar corporations pay premium rates to access—available to the general public for the first time. Taking the reigns from Larry Bossidy’s Execution, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy, and Kash’s own The New Law of Demand and Supply, this is a must-have for succeeding in business in the twenty-first century.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

By Michael Lewis

Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can’t buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the front offices of major league teams, and the dugouts, perhaps even in the minds of the players themselves. Lewis mines all these possibilities—his intimate and original portraits of big league ballplayers are alone worth the price of admission—but the real jackpot is a cache of numbers—numbers!—collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers and physics professors. What these geek numbers show—no, prove—is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls.

Billy paid attention to those numbers —with the second lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to—and this book records his astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. Moneyball is a roller coaster ride: before the 2002 season opens, Oakland must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players, is written off by just about everyone, and then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins.

In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win…how can we not cheer for David?

Goal: The Ball Doesn’t Go In By Chance: Management Ideas from the World of Footbal

By Ferran Soriano

This book contains fascinating facts that aren’t found in either the sports or business press that reveal the behind the scenes world of international football. Soriano teaches us the importance of strategy as he examines how managers can waste millions of euros making decisions that lack any logic at all in both football and business.

A top entrepreneur helps readers breathe life into a stagnant business by overhauling their approach to branding and customer service. Packed with 75 simple, actionable strategies straight from the trenches of the service industry, Selling Sunshine explores the peaks and valleys of running your own business through the eyes of a proven expert. Growing up in a single-parent family in the Midwest, author Tony Hartl had the odds stacked against him. From a young age, Hartl took little more than an entrepreneurial spirit and a lot of hard work and turned it into one profitable business after another. By applying the tips detailed in Selling Sunshine, he overcame the obstacles of poverty, became a homeowner while still in his teens, and put himself through college. His greatest success, founding and running the Planet Tan Corporation, saw his net worth jump from $10,000 to millions of dollars in a thirteen-year period. Hartl’s example is a blueprint for creating, maintaining, and growing a meaningful business with a fulfilling company culture.

Teeming: How Superorganisms Work Together to Build Infinite Wealth on a Finite Planet (and your company can too)

By Tamsin Woolley-Barker

The most successful species are those that adapt to change, and the same is true in business. But there are limits to vertical growth, and our hierarchical structures can only grow so tall before complexity and instability overwhelm them. Today’s global organizations need a new way to sense and respond to change. Earth’s most ancient and successful societies – the ants and termites, and vast fungal networks underground – have already solved the problem. For hundreds of millions of years, they have worked in huge cities ― tens of millions strong ― compounding their wealth from one generation to the next with no management whatsoever. With just four simple principles ― Collective Intelligence, Distributed Leadership, Swarm Creativity, and Regenerative Value ― Teeming shows how these simple individuals pool their diverse and independent experiences to create rich hotspots of abundance and exquisite resilience to change. We can do it too.

By identifying and describing the most powerful financial and non-financial KPIs, this book will make life easier for you by defining them, explaining how and when they should be used and providing a rich library of KPIs that have been proven to significantly improve performance.

The book presents case examples to illustrate the selection and use of the KPIs and provides tools such as KPI selection templates and Key Performance Questions to help you apply the most appropriate KPIs effectively in your business.

Reinventing Organizations

By Frederic Laloux

In this groundbreaking book, the author shows that every time humanity has shifted to a new stage of consciousness in the past, it has invented a whole new way to structure and run organizations, each time bringing extraordinary breakthroughs in collaboration. A new shift in consciousness is currently underway.

The pioneering organizations researched for this book have already “cracked the code.” Their founders have fundamentally questioned every aspect of management and have come up with entirely new organizational methods. Even though they operate in very different industries and geographies and did not know of each other’s experiments, the structures and practices they have developed are remarkably similar. It’s hard not to get excited about this finding: a new organizational model seems to be emerging, and it promises a soulful revolution in the workplace.

“Reinventing Organizations” describes in practical detail how organizations large and small can operate in this new paradigm. Leaders, founders, coaches, and consultants will find this work a joyful handbook, full of insights, examples, and inspiring stories.

The First Billion Is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America’s Energy Future

By T. Boone Pickens

Both a riveting account of a life spent pulling off improbable triumphs and a report back from the front of the global-energy and natural-resource wars, The First Billion Is the Hardest tells the story of the remarkable late-life comeback that brought the famed oilman and maverick back from bankruptcy and clinical depression. Along the way, the man often called the “Oracle of Oil” shares the insights that have made him a legend–and describes the billion-dollar bets he is now making in hopes of securing America’s energy independence.

Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation

In an oversaturated culture defined by limited time and focus, how do we draw attention to our messages, our ideas, and our products when we only have seconds to compete?

Fascination is the most powerful way to capture an audience and influence behavior.

Structured around the seven languages of fascination Hogshead has studied and developed—power, passion, innovation, alarm, mystique, prestige, and alert—Fascinate explores how anyone can use these triggers to make products, messages, and services more fascinating—and more successful.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

By Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives—how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they explore the hidden side of . . . well, everything.

Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

By Malcolm Gladwell

Three thousand years ago on a battlefield in ancient Palestine, a shepherd boy felled a mighty warrior with nothing more than a pebble and a sling-and ever since, the names of David and Goliath have stood for battles between underdogs and giants. David’s victory was improbable and miraculous. He shouldn’t have won.

Or should he?

In DAVID AND GOLIATH, Malcolm Gladwell challenges how we think about obstacles and disadvantages, offering a new interpretation of what it means to be discriminated against, suffer from a disability, lose a parent, attend a mediocre school, or endure any number of other apparent setbacks.

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

By Bill Burnett, Dave Evans

In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It

By Michael E. Gerber

In this first new and totally revised edition of the 150,000-copy underground bestseller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. He walks you through the steps in the life of a business from entrepreneurial infancy, through adolescent growing pains, to the mature entrepreneurial perspective, the guiding light of all businesses that succeed. He then shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business whether or not it is a franchise. Finally, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business. After you have read The E-Myth Revisited, you will truly be able to grow your business in a predictable and productive way.

Double Double: How to Double Your Revenue and Profit in 3 Years or Less

By Cameron Herold

A step-by-step guide to enjoying the roller-coaster ride of growth — while getting the most out of life as an entrepreneur. A growth-focused approach: The book is divided into three sections, which cover planning for fast growth, building a company for fast growth, and leading for fast growth. Each topic the author covers — from creating a vision for the company’s future to learning how to generate free PR for a developing company — is squarely focused on the end goal: doubling the size of the entrepreneur’s company in three years or less. A down-to-earth action plan: Herold’s experienced-based advice never gets bogged down in generalities or theory. Instead, he offers a wealth of practical tips, including: How to design meetings for maximum efficiency; How to hire top-quality talent; How to grow in particularly tough markets; How to put together a board of advisors — even for a smaller company; How even the busy entrepreneur can achieve a work/life balance.

First, Break All The Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently

By Marcus Buckingham, Gallup Organization

In this longtime management bestseller, Gallup presents the remarkable findings of its massive in-depth study of great managers. Some were in leadership positions. Others were front-line supervisors. Some were in Fortune 500 companies; others were key players in small, entrepreneurial firms. Whatever their circumstances, the managers who ultimately became the focus of Gallup’s research were those who excelled at turning each individual employee’s talent into high performance.

Gallup has found that the front-line manager is the key to attracting and retaining talented employees. This book explains how the best managers select an employee for talent rather than for skills or experience, set expectations, build on each person’s unique strengths rather than trying to fix his or her weaknesses, and get the best performance out of their teams.

And perhaps most important, Gallup’s research produced the 12 simple statements that distinguish the strongest departments of a company from all the rest. First, Break All the Rules is the first book to present this essential measuring stick and to prove the link between employee opinions and productivity, profit, customer satisfaction and the rate of turnover.

First, Break All the Rules presents vital performance and career lessons for managers at every level — and best of all, shows you how to apply them to your own situation.

The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization

By Peter Drucker

With Peter Drucker’s five essential questions and the help of fiveof today’s thought leaders, this little book will challenge readersto take a close look at the very heart of their organizations andwhat drives them. A tool for self-assessment and transformation,answering these five questions will fundamentally change the wayyou work, helping you lead your organization to an exceptionallevel of performance.

These essential questions, grounded in Peter Drucker’s theoriesof management, will take readers on a exploration of organizationaland personal self-discovery, giving them a means to assess how tobe–how to develop quality, character, mind-set, values andcourage. The questions lead to action. By asking these questions,readers can focus on why they are doing what they are doing intheir work, and how to do it better. Designed for today’s busyprofessionals, this brief, clear and accessible book will challengereaders to ask these provocative questions and it will stimulatespirited discussions and action within any organization, inspiringpositive change and new levels of excellence, helping all toenvision the future of theirs’ or any organization.

The Future Workplace Experience presents an actionable framework for meeting today’s toughest business disruptions head-on. It guides you step-by-step through the process of recruiting top employees and building an engaged culture―one that will drive your company to long-term success.

Everything we took for granted in the past― from what we expect from our jobs to whom we work with and how―is changing before our eyes. The strongest organizations today are “learning machines.” New challenges require new solutions―and these organizations are finding them.

If you want to compete in the years to come, you have to meet the future now. The Future Workplace Experience is your playbook for taking your organization to the top of your industry.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

By Daniel Kahneman

In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation―each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.

Tongue Fu!: How to Deflect, Disarm, and Defuse Any Verbal Conflict

By Sam Horn

If you’ve ever been tongue-tied – or if you’ve ever given a tongue-lashing (and regretted it), Tongue Fu! offers constructive alternatives that will turn hostility into harmony and help you avoid a mental breakdown in the face of aggression. With straightforward strategies and proven techniques, Tongue Fu! examines almost every kind of verbal conflict – from fights with your spouse or a stalemate with the kids – and shows how to use martial arts for the mind and mouth to deflect attacks, disarm disputes, and defuse any explosive situation. With Tongue Fu! you will learn words to use (and words to lose) in tense situations, the power of the phrase “You’re right,” the tools to use when people push your “hot buttons,” how to handle a verbal bully who enjoys attacking and tormenting, how to gracefully exit an argument, what to say when you don’t know what to say, how to use silence to your advantage, how to be pleasantly unpleasant, and how to take charge of your emotions.

Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts–Becoming the Person You Want to Be

By Marshall Goldsmith, Mark Reiter

In Triggers, his most powerful and insightful book yet, Goldsmith shows how we can overcome the trigger points in our lives, and enact meaningful and lasting change. Goldsmith offers a simple “magic bullet” solution in the form of daily self-monitoring, hinging around what he calls “active” questions. These are questions that measure our effort, not our results. There’s a difference between achieving and trying; we can’t always achieve a desired result, but anyone can try. In the course of Triggers, Goldsmith details the six “engaging questions” that can help us take responsibility for our efforts to improve and help us recognize when we fall short.

Filled with revealing and illuminating stories from his work with some of the most successful chief executives and power brokers in the business world, Goldsmith offers a personal playbook on how to achieve change in our lives, make it stick, and become the person we want to be.

What’s the Secret?: To Providing a World-Class Customer Experience

By John R. DiJulius

What’s the Secret? gives you an inside look at theworld-class customer service strategies of some of today’sbest companies. You’ll learn how companies like Disney, Nordstrom,and The Ritz-Carlton get 50,000 employees to deliver world-classcustomer service on a consistent basis- and how your company cantoo. Packed with insider knowledge and a wealth of proven bestpractices, author John DiJulius will show you how your company canemulate the world’s best customer service providers.

Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: The Results-Only Revolution

By Cali Ressler, Jody Thompson

In a results-only workplace, employees can do whatever they want whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. No more pointless meetings, racing to get in at 9:00, or begging for permission to watch your kid play soccer. You make the decisions about what you do and where you do it.

It sounds like a fantasy, but Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson are leading a movement to make it a reality, even implementing it successfully at best buy. They show how a Results-Only Work Environment not only makes employees happier, but also delivers better results.

Filled with passion and common sense, their book will change the way you think about your job, your company, and your quality of life.

Off Balance: Getting Beyond the Work-Life Balance Myth to Personal and Professional Satisfaction

By Matthew Kelly

One of the major issues in our lives today is work-life balance. Everyone wants it; no one has it. But Matthew Kelly believes that work- life balance was a mistake from the start. Because we don’t really want balance. We want satisfaction.

Kelly lays out the system he uses with his clients, his team, and himself to find deep, long-term satisfaction both personally and professionally. He introduces us to the three philosophies of our age that are dragging us down. He shows us how to cultivate the energy that will give us enough battery power for everything we need and want to do. And finally, in five clear steps, he shows us how to use his Personal & Professional Satisfaction System to establish and honor our biggest priorities, even if we spend a lot more time on some of the lesser ones.

Think and Grow Rich

By Napoleon Hill

Think and Grow Rich is a motivational personal development and self-help book by Napoleon Hill and inspired by a suggestion from Scottish-American businessman Andrew Carnegie. While the title implies that this book deals with how to get rich, the author explains that the philosophy taught in the book can be used to help people succeed in all lines of work and to do or be almost anything they want. Jim Murray (sportswriter) wrote that Think and Grow Rich was credited for Ken Norton’s boxing upset of Muhammad Ali in 1973. The Reverend Charles Stanley writes, “I began to apply the principles of (Think and Grow Rich) to my endeavors as a pastor, and I discovered they worked!” The book was first published during the Great Depression. At the time of Hill’s death in 1970, Think and Grow Rich had sold more than 20 million copies and by 2011 over 70 million copies had been sold worldwide. It remains the biggest seller of Napoleon Hill’s books.

Outwitting the Devil: The Secret to Freedom and Success

By Napoleon Hill

Using his legendary ability to get to the root of human potential, Napoleon Hill digs deep to reveal how fear, procrastination, anger, and jealousy prevent us from realizing our personal goals. This long-suppressed parable, once considered too controversial to publish, was written by Hill in 1938 following the publication of his classic bestseller, Think and Grow Rich. Annotated and edited for a contemporary audience by Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Three Feet from Gold co-author Sharon Lechter, this book–now available in paper–is profound, powerful, resonant, and rich with insight.

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles

By Steven Pressfield

A succinct, engaging, and practical guide for succeeding in any creative sphere, The War of Art is nothing less than Sun-Tzu for the soul. hat keeps so many of us from doing what we long to do? Why is there a naysayer within? How can we avoid the roadblocks of any creative endeavor—be it starting up a dream business venture, writing a novel, or painting a masterpiece? Bestselling novelist Steven Pressfield identif ies the enemy that every one of us must face, outlines a battle plan to conquer this internal foe, then pinpoints just how to achieve the greatest success. The War of Art emphasizes the resolve needed to recognize and overcome the obstacles of ambition and then effectively shows how to reach the highest level of creative discipline. Think of it as tough love . . . for yourself. Whether an artist, writer or business person, this simple, personal, and no-nonsense book will inspire you to seize the potential of your life.

The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family: A Leadership Fable About Restoring Sanity To The Most Important Organization In Your Life

By Patrick Lencioni

In this unique and groundbreaking book, business consultant and New York Times best-selling author Patrick Lencioni turns his sights on the most important organization in our lives—the family. As a husband and the father of four young boys, Lencioni realized the discrepancy between the time and energy his clients put into running their organizations and the reactive way most people run their personal lives. Having experienced the stress of a frantic family firsthand, he and his wife began applying some of the tools he uses with Fortune 500 companies at home, and with surprising results.

The Generosity Factor: Discover the Joy of Giving Your Time, Talent, and Treasure

By Ken Blanchard

The Generosity Factor™―a way to give time, talent, treasure, and touch to those in need.Providing a unique twist on what it means to thrive in business, at home, and in life, this story will forever change your definition of success.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

By David Allen

Since it was first published almost fifteen years ago, David Allen’s Getting Things Done has become one of the most influential business books of its era, and the ultimate book on personal organization. “GTD” is now shorthand for an entire way of approaching professional and personal tasks, and has spawned an entire culture of websites, organizational tools, seminars, and offshoots.

How to Say No Without Feeling Guilty: And Say Yes to More Time, and What Matters Most to You

By Patti Breitman

The simple word “no” is often the most difficult to say. Yet anyone can develop the skills to say no with confidence, kindness, and peace of mind. And the benefits are enormous. You’ll spend less time doing things you don’t want to do with people you don’t want to see, and move closer to your own priorities and passions.

How to Say No Without Feeling Guilty shows you:

The five simple techniques that will help you say no with finesse in nearly any situation
How to apply two basic principles to minimize guilt about saying no and reduce the likelihood of personal conflicts

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

By Dale Carnegie

Learn how to break the worry habit — Now and forever!
With Dale Carnegie’s timeless advice in hand, more than six million people have learned how to eliminate debilitating fear and worry from their lives and to embrace a worry-free future. In this classic work, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Carnegie offers a set of practical formulas that you can put to work today. It is a book packed with lessons that will last a lifetime and make that lifetime happier!

The Influence of Man

By Matthew A. Gallagher

Written as a subjective non-fiction, The Influence of Man explores a perceptive approach to how people view themselves and their position in a greater global society. This book ranges from chapter topics in global and national statistics of concern, thought provoking parables designed to challenge the way readers see and act within the world, examinations of divisive and dogmatic beliefs that are responsible for subjecting entire groups of people to oppression, the dire need to refocus the intent of education, to the scientific principles of climate change, and introduces a new method to mathmatically evaluate the fundamental components of climate change while reviewing concerning rates and functions related to foundational climatalogic destruction.

Inside the Grass Hut: Living Shitou’s Classic Zen Poem

By Ben Connelly

Shitou Xiqian’s “Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage” is a remarkably accessible work of profound depth; in thirty-two lines Shitou expresses the breadth of the entire Buddhist tradition with simple, vivid imagery. Ben Connelly’s Inside the Grass Hut unpacks the timeless poem and applies it to contemporary life. His book delivers a wealth of information on the context and content of this eighth-century work, as well as directly evokes the poem’s themes of simple living, calm, and a deep sense of connection to all things.

Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It

By Kamal Ravikant

This book is based on the truth I spoke about. It’s something I learned from within myself, something I believed saved me. And more than that, the way I set about to do it. This is a collection of thoughts on what I learned, what worked, what didn’t. Where I succeed and importantly, where I fail daily. The truth is to love yourself with the same intensity you would use to pull yourself up if you were hanging off a cliff with your fingers. As if your life depended upon it. Once you get going, it’s not hard to do. Just takes commitment and I’ll share how I did it. It’s been transformative for me. I know it will be transformative for you as well.

Managing Oneself

By Peter F. Drucker

We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: with ambition, drive, and talent, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession regardless of where you started out. But with opportunity comes responsibility. Companies today aren’t managing their knowledge workers careers. Instead, you must be your own chief executive officer. That means it’s up to you to carve out your place in the world and know when to change course. And it’s up to you to keep yourself engaged and productive during a career that may span some 50 years. In Managing Oneself, Peter Drucker explains how to do it. The keys: Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself by identifying your most valuable strengths and most dangerous weaknesses; Articulate how you learn and work with others and what your most deeply held values are; and Describe the type of work environment where you can make the greatest contribution. Only when you operate with a combination of your strengths and self-knowledge can you achieve true and lasting excellence. Managing Oneself identifies the probing questions you need to ask to gain the insights essential for taking charge of your career. Peter Drucker was a writer, teacher, and consultant. His 34 books have been published in more than 70 languages. He founded the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, and counseled 13 governments, public services institutions, and major corporations.

Managing Oneself: The Key to Success

By Peter F. Drucker

Peter Drucker is widely regarded as the father of modern management, offering penetrating insights into business that still resonate today. But Drucker also offers deep wisdom on how to manage our personal lives and how to become more effective leaders. In these two classic articles from Harvard Business Review, Drucker reveals the keys to becoming your own chief executive officer as well as a better leader of others. “Managing Oneself” identifies the probing questions you need to ask to gain the insights essential for taking charge of your career, while “What Makes an Effective Executive” outlines the key behaviors you must adopt in order to lead. Together, they chart a powerful course to help you carve out your place in the world.

Meditations

By Marcus Aurelius

Meditations is a series of personal writings by Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor 161 180 CE, setting forth his ideas on Stoic philosophy. Marcus Aurelius wrote the 12 books of the Meditations in Koine Greek as a source for his own guidance and self-improvement. It is possible that large portions of the work were written at Sirmium, where he spent much time planning military campaigns from 170 to 180. Some of it was written while he was positioned at Aquincum on campaign in Pannonia, because internal notes tell us that the second book was written when he was campaigning against the Quadi on the river Granova (modern-day Hron) and the third book was written at Carnuntum. It is not clear that he ever intended the writings to be published, so the title Meditations is but one of several commonly assigned to the collection. These writings take the form of quotations varying in length from one sentence to long paragraphs.

The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy

By Thomas J. Stanley

The bestselling The Millionaire Next Door identifies seven common traits that show up again and again among those who have accumulated wealth. Most of the truly wealthy in this country don’t live in Beverly Hills or on Park Avenue-they live next door. This new edition, the first since 1998, includes a new foreword for the twenty-first century by Dr. Thomas J. Stanley.

Mini Habits: Smaller Habits, Bigger Results

By Stephen Guise

A mini habit is a very small positive behavior that you force yourself to do every day; its “too small to fail” nature makes it weightless, deceptively powerful, and a superior habit-building strategy. You will have no choice but to believe in yourself when you’re always moving forward.

The barrier to the first step is so low that even depressed or “stuck” people can find early success and begin to reverse their lives right away. And if you think one push-up a day is too small to matter, I’ve got one heck of a story for you!

The message is that you should aim very high and even if you fall short, you’ll still get somewhere. I’ve found the opposite to be true in regards to productivity and healthy behaviors. When you aim for the moon, you won’t do anything because it’s too far away. But when you aim for the step in front of you, you might keep going and reach the moon.

Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It Back If You Lose It

By Marshall Goldsmith

Mojo is the moment when we do something that’s purposeful, powerful, and positive and the rest of the world recognizes it. This book is about that moment–and how we can create it in our lives, maintain it, and recapture it when we need it.

Our professional and personal Mojo is impacted by four key factors: identity (who do you think you are), achievement (what have you done lately?), reputation (who do other people think you are–and what have you’ve done lately?), and acceptance (what can you change–and when do you need to just “let it go”?). Goldsmith outlines the positive actions leaders must take, with their teams or themselves, to initiate winning streaks and keep them coming.

Mojo is: that positive spirit–towards what we are doing–now–that starts from the inside–and radiates to the outside. Mojo is at its peak when we are experiencing both happiness and meaning in what we are doing and communicating this experience to the world around us. The Mojo Toolkit provides fourteen practical tools to help you achieve both happiness and meaning–not only in business, but in life.

The Myth of Multitasking: How “Doing It All” Gets Nothing Done

By Dave Crenshaw

In a compelling business fable, The Myth of Multitasking confronts a popular idea that has come to define our hectic, work-a-day world. This simple yet powerful book shows clearly why multitasking is, in fact, a lie that wastes time and costs money. Far from being efficient, multitasking actually damages productivity and relationships at work and at home.

The One Minute Manager

By Kenneth Blanchard

The bestselling team of Ken Blanchard and Robert Lorber bring you the ever-timely strategies of one-minute management in Putting the One Minute Manager to Work — an indispensable success tool for any manager striving to get the most from his or her people. This essential follow-up to The One Minute Manager applies the secrets of One Minute Goal Setting, One Minute Praisings and One Minute Reprimands to real-life situations so that you can put them to work in your life immediately!

Paid To Speak: Best Practices For Building A Successful Speaking Business

By National Speakers Association

Covering every aspect of launching, building, and maintaining a successful speaking career, Paid to Speak is a must-read for professional speakers–whether keynote speaker, motivator, coach, trainer, facilitator, or consultant–as well as those aspiring to a speaking career.

Book The Business: How To Make BIG MONEY With Your Book Without Even Selling A Single Copy

By Adam Witty & Dan Kennedy

BOOK AUTHORSHIP for personal promotion, to create powerful ‘lead generation magnets’ for use in advertising, for securing favorable media attention and publicity, to promote a cause or philosophy, for fun or fame or fortune …is the most proven, most powerful activity a person can take!

Change to Strange: Create a Great Organization by Building a Strange Workforce

By Daniel M. Cable

To achieve sustained competitive advantage, you must create and deliver something that’s valuable, rare, and hard to imitate–and you can’t do that with a run-of-the-mill workforce. Your workforce needs to be strikingly different, obsessively focused on delivering on your unique value proposition. Compared with everyone else’s workforce, your people need to be downright strange!

This book is about everything it takes to build a workforce that’s strange and extraordinary enough to execute your most powerful strategies and your unique value proposition. It’s about understanding exactly how your workforce needs to be different…creating an end-to-end Strange Workforce Value Chain…implementing workforce systems that support your unique goals…establishing detailed metrics based on what makes you unique…using those metrics to drive clarity throughout your entire organization, and steer it toward success.

If you’re tasked with executing strategy through people, and “balanced scorecards” and “strategy maps” just haven’t been enough, take your next and greatest leap forward: make the Change to Strange.

Crazy Busy: A (Mercifully) Short Book about a (Really) Big Problem

“I’M TOO BUSY!” We’ve all heard it. We’ve all said it. All too often, busyness gets the best of us.

Just one look at our jam-packed schedules tells us how hard it can be to strike a well-reasoned balance between doing nothing and doing it all.

That’s why award-winning author and pastor Kevin DeYoung addresses the busyness problem head on in his newest book, Crazy Busy — and not with the typical arsenal of time management tips, but rather with the biblical tools we need to get to the source of the issue and pull the problem out by the roots.

Highly practical and super short, Crazy Busy will help you put an end to “busyness as usual.”

Am I Being Too Subtle?: Straight Talk From a Business Rebel

By Sam Zell

The traits that make Sam Zell one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs also make him one of the most surprising, enigmatic, and entertaining mavericks in American business.

Self-made billionaire Sam Zell consistently sees what others don’t. From finding a market for overpriced Playboy magazines among his junior high classmates, to buying real estate on the cheap after a market crash, to investing in often unglamorous industries with long-term value, Zell acts boldly on supply and demand trends to grab the first-mover advantage. And he can find opportunity virtually anywhere—from an arcane piece of legislation to a desert meeting in Abu Dhabi.

Chop Wood Carry Water: How to Fall in Love with the Process of Becoming Great

By Joshua Medcalf

Guided by “Akira-sensei,” John comes to realize the greatest adversity on his journey will be the challenge of defeating the man in the mirror. This powerful story of one boy’s journey to achieve his life long goal of becoming a samurai warrior, brings the Train to be Clutch curriculum to life in a powerful and memorable way.

212: The Extra Degree

By Sam Parker

You found it! This is the ORIGINAL 212° the extra degree bestselling book that has been used in training’s and workshops worldwide. Written by Sam Parker and published by The Walk The Talk Company, this powerful resource will immediately capture the attention of everyone in your organization and motivate them to new and higher levels of performance.

It’s the message that’s motivating millions!

212° the extra degree captures the essence of excellence in an unforgettable way.

At 211° water is hot. At 212°, it boils. And with boiling water, comes steam. And with steam, you can power a train.

The one extra degree makes the difference. The 212° concept is illustrated through a clear introduction and then supported by a series of thoughts, examples, and facts that will help readers absorb the 212° mindset. Its purpose is to inspire the extra level of effort that produces exponential results. This book will encourage anyone who reads it to give that extra degree of effort…the extra degree that will produce exponential results. At 5.5 x 5.3 inches (paperback), it’s a wonderful little manifesto for encouraging the extra level of effort we all know produces great results. This is the original book that started it all! This book is the perfect handout to inspire something big!

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!

By Robert Kiyosaki

Rich Dad Poor Dad is Robert’s story of growing up with two dads — his real father and the father of his best friend, his rich dad — and the ways in which both men shaped his thoughts about money and investing. The book explodes the myth that you need to earn a high income to be rich and explains the difference between working for money and having your money work for you.

Coach Wooden’s Greatest Secret: The Power of a Lot of Little Things Done Well

By Pat Williams

At the first practice of each season, legendary coach John Wooden taught his players how to put on their socks and shoes a very particular way. When asked about this, he replied, “The little things matter. All I need is one little wrinkle in one sock to put a blister on one foot–and it could ruin my whole season. I started teaching about shoes and socks early in my career, and I saw that it really did cut down on blisters during the season. That little detail gave us an edge.” Coach Wooden knew the long-term impact of little things done well.

Now Pat Williams takes Coach Wooden’s lesson, along with stories of people whose lives have exemplified the importance of little things done well, and shows readers how the small things one does or doesn’t do drastically affect one’s integrity, reputation, health, career, faith, and success. People who want to do their best in life, family, work, and faith will benefit from this entertaining and inspirational book.

The Art of War for Executives: Ancient Knowledge for Today’s Business Professional

By Donald G. Krause

Success is an art form that few can master. Here, Sun Tzu’s ancient principles of war, reinterpreted for the modern businessperson, offer the skills to gain an advantage and achieve success on the corporate battlefield…and the strategies to win at work when conflicts arise.

Emotional Intelligence 2.0

By Travis Bradberry

In today’s fast-paced world of competitive workplaces and turbulent economic conditions, each of us is searching for effective tools that can help us to manage, adapt, and strike out ahead of the pack.

By now, emotional intelligence (EQ) needs little introduction—it’s no secret that EQ is critical to your success. But knowing what EQ is and knowing how to use it to improve your life are two very different things.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

By Robert Caildini

Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say “yes”—and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior has resulted in this highly acclaimed book.

You’ll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader—and how to defend yourself against them. Perfect for people in all walks of life, the principles of Influence will move you toward profound personal change and act as a driving force for your success.

2 Second Lean

By Paul Akers

2 Second Lean will flip your world right-side up. It’s a practical way to improve your life every day by making a simple 2 second improvement. Join author, business expert, radio show host, and international speaker, Paul A. Akers, as he takes you on a LEAN journey that will transform every aspect your life… from your home to the office.

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

By Phil Knight

In this age of start-ups, Knight’s Nike is the gold standard, and its swoosh is one of the few icons instantly recognized in every corner of the world.

But Knight, the man behind the swoosh, has always been a mystery. In Shoe Dog, he tells his story at last. At twenty-four, Knight decides that rather than work for a big corporation, he will create something all his own, new, dynamic, different. He details the many risks he encountered, the crushing setbacks, the ruthless competitors and hostile bankers—as well as his many thrilling triumphs. Above all, he recalls the relationships that formed the heart and soul of Nike, with his former track coach, the irascible and charismatic Bill Bowerman, and with his first employees, a ragtag group of misfits and savants who quickly became a band of swoosh-crazed brothers.

Bringing Out the Best in People: How to Enjoy Helping Others Excel

By Alan Loy McGinnis

Alan Loy McGinnis, author of the best- selling book The Friendship Factor, studied the great leaders throughout history, the most effective organization, and many prominent psychologists to discover their motivational secrets. There are actually a small number of principles used by good motivators, and the best leaders were using them long before psychology had a name. Fascinating case studies and anecdotes about Lee Iacocca, Sandra Day O’Connor, and many others show how you can put 12 key principles to work in your family or organization. Whether you are a parent, executive, teacher, or friend, you can gain the satisfaction that comes from Bringing the Best Out in People.

The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t

By Robert I. Sutton

“What an asshole!”

How many times have you said that about someone at work? You’re not alone! In this groundbreaking book, Stanford University professor Robert I. Sutton builds on his acclaimed Harvard Business Review article to show you the best ways to deal with assholes…and why they can be so destructive to your company. Practical, compassionate, and in places downright funny, this guide offers:
Strategies on how to pinpoint and eliminate negative influences for good
Illuminating case histories from major organizations
A self-diagnostic test and a program to identify and keep your own “inner jerk” from coming out

The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

By Michael A. Singer

Whether this is your first exploration of inner space, or you’ve devoted your life to the inward journey, this book will transform your relationship with yourself and the world around you. You’ll discover what you can do to put an end to the habitual thoughts and emotions that limit your consciousness. By tapping into traditions of meditation and mindfulness, author and spiritual teacher Michael A. Singer shows how the development of consciousness can enable us all to dwell in the present moment and let go of painful thoughts and memories that keep us from achieving happiness and self-realization.

The Untethered Soul begins by walking you through your relationship with your thoughts and emotions, helping you uncover the source and fluctuations of your inner energy. It then delves into what you can do to free yourself from the habitual thoughts, emotions, and energy patterns that limit your consciousness. Finally, with perfect clarity, this book opens the door to a life lived in the freedom of your innermost being.

The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune

By Conor O'Clery

Chuck Feeney was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to a blue-collar Irish-American family during the Depression. After service in the Korean War, he made a fortune as founder of Duty Free Shoppers, the world’s largest duty-free retail chain. By 1988, he was hailed by Forbes Magazine as the twenty-fourth richest American alive. But secretly Feeney had already transferred all his wealth to his foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies. Only in 1997 when he sold his duty free interests, was he “outed” as one of the greatest and most mysterious American philanthropists in modern times. After going “underground” again, he emerged in 2005 to cooperate on a biography promoting giving while living. Now in his mid-seventies, Feeney is determined his foundation should spend down the remaining 4 billion in his lifetime.

Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think

By Peter Diamandis, Steven Kotler

In Abundance, space entrepreneur turned innovation pioneer Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler document how progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, digital manufacturing synthetic biology, and other exponentially growing technologies will enable us to make greater gains in the next two decades than we have in the previous 200 years. We will soon have the ability to meet and exceed the basic needs of every person on the planet. Abundance for all is within our grasp.

Breaking down human needs by category—water, food, energy, healthcare, education, freedom—Diamandis and Kotler introduce us to innovators and industry captains making tremendous strides in each area.

The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

By Lynn Twist

This liberating book shows us that examining our attitudes toward money―earning it, spending it, and giving it away―offers surprising insight into our lives. Through personal stories and practical advice, Lynne Twist asks us to discover our relationship with money, understand how we use it, and by assessing our core human values, align our relationship with it to our desired goals. In doing so, we can transform our lives.

The Soul of Money now includes a foreword from Jack Canfield and a new introduction by Lynne Twist, in which she explores the effects of the Great Recession and environmental concerns about our monetary needs and aims.

Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss

By Joel Fuhrman

The Eat To Live 2011 revised edition includes updated scientific research supporting Dr. Fuhrman’s revolutionary six-week plan and a brand new chapter highlighting Dr. Fuhrman’s discovery of toxic hunger and the role of food addiction in weight issues. This new chapter provides novel and important insights into weight gain. It explains how and why eating the wrong foods causes toxic hunger and the desire to over consume calories; whereas a diet of high micronutrient quality causes true hunger which decreases the sensations leading to food cravings and overeating behaviors. It instructs readers on how to leave behind the discomfort of toxic hunger, cravings, and addictions to unhealthy foods.

New recipes and menus are included as well as new and updated Frequently Asked Questions.

This is a book that will let you live longer, reduce your need for medications, and improve your health dramatically. It is a book that will change the way you want to eat. Most importantly, if you follow the Eat To Live™ diet, you will lose weight faster than you ever thought possible.

Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time

By Susan Scott

The master teacher of positive change through powerful communication, Susan Scott wants you to succeed. To do that, she explains, you must transform everyday conversations at work and at home with effective ways to get your message across—and get what you want. In this guide, which includes a workbook and The Seven Principles of Fierce Conversations, Scott teaches you how to:

• Overcome barriers to meaningful communication
• Expand and enrich relationships with colleagues, friends, and family
• Increase clarity and improve understanding
• Handle strong emotions—on both sides of the table
• Connect with colleagues, customers and family at a deep level

The Five Minute Journal: A Happier You in 5 Minutes a Day

By Intelligent Change

THE SIMPLEST WAY TO START YOUR DAY HAPPY – Using the science of positive psychology to improve happiness, The Five Minute Journal focuses your attention on the good in your life. Improve your mental well-being and feel better every day.

COMPLAIN LESS, APPRECIATE MORE – The Five Minute Journal helps you cultivate gratitude. It changes how you feel, alters the actions you take, and therefore the results you will create…negativity be gone!

FINALLY KEEP A JOURNAL – With a simple structured format that takes just 5 minutes, The Five Minute Journal is simple, quick, and effective. Whatever your excuse for not keeping a journal is, this journal will eliminate them.

Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence

By Daniel Goleman

In Focus, psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman delves into the science of attention in all its varieties, presenting a long-overdue discussion of this little-noticed and underrated mental asset that matters enormously for how we navigate life.

Attention works much like a muscle: use it poorly and it can wither; work it well and it grows. In an era of unstoppable distractions, Goleman persuasively argues that now more than ever we must learn to sharpen focus if we are to contend with, let alone thrive in, a complex world. Goleman analyzes attention research as a threesome: inner, other, and outer focus. He shows why high-performers need all three kinds of focus, as demonstrated by rich case studies from fields as diverse as competitive sports, education, the arts, and business. Those who excel rely on what Goleman calls smart practice that helps them improve habits, add new skills, and sustain excellence.

Combining cutting-edge research with practical findings, Focus reveals what distinguishes experts from amateurs and stars from average performers.

From Success to Significance: When the Pursuit of Success Isn’t Enough

By Lloyd Reeb

In From Success to Significance, Lloyd unfolds a blueprint that has helped thousands of men and women redefine success and infuse their lives with eternal significance. Adapt Reeb’s approach to your circumstances and, with God’s help, put it in motion. It works, and it will work for you. Discover God’s unique purpose for your life. Your talents, your drives, and everything you are will make sense in a new way and have an impact you’ve never dreamed of. Go ahead, start dreaming. Because significance is within your reach, and it starts by finding the freedom to dream. “Many people measure their success by wealth, recognition, power, and status. There’s nothing wrong with those, but if that’s all you’re focused on, you’re missing the boat. Lloyd Reeb shows that if you focus on significance—using your time and talent to serve others—that’s when truly meaningful success can come your way.”

Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it)

By Salim Ismail, Michael Malone, and Yuri Van Geest

In business, performance is key. In performance, how you organize can be the key to growth.

In the past five years, the business world has seen the birth of a new breed of company―the Exponential Organization―that has revolutionized how a company can accelerate its growth by using technology. An ExO can eliminate the incremental, linear way traditional companies get bigger, leveraging assets like community, big data, algorithms, and new technology into achieving performance benchmarks ten times better than its peers.

Three luminaries of the business world―Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest, and Mike Malone―have researched this phenomenon and documented ten characteristics of Exponential Organizations. Here, in EXPONENTIAL ORGANIZATIONS, they walk the reader through how any company, from a startup to a multi-national, can become an ExO, streamline its performance, and grow to the next level.

The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book)

By Don Miguez Ruiz

In The Four Agreements, bestselling author don Miguel Ruiz reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering. Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, The Four Agreements offer a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love.

The Dhammapada (Easwaran’s Classics of Indian Spirituality)

By Eknath Easwaran

Dhammapada means “the path of dharma,” the path of harmony and righteousness that anyone can follow to reach the highest good. The Dhammapada is a collection of verses, gathered probably from direct disciples who wanted to preserve what they had heard from the Buddha himself. Easwaran’s best-selling translation of this classic Buddhist text is based on the original Pali.

Easwaran is a master storyteller, and the introduction includes many stories that make moving, memorable reading, bringing young Siddhartha and his heroic spiritual quest vividly to life. This faithful interpretation brings us closer to the compassionate heart of the Buddha.

Ego Is the Enemy

By Ryan Holiday

Many of us insist the main impediment to a full, successful life is the outside world. In fact, the most common enemy lies within: our ego. Early in our careers, it impedes learning and the cultivation of talent. With success, it can blind us to our faults and sow future problems. In failure, it magnifies each blow and makes recovery more difficult. At every stage, ego holds us back.

In an era that glorifies social media, reality TV, and other forms of shameless self-promotion, the battle against ego must be fought on many fronts. Armed with the lessons in this book, as Holiday writes, “you will be less invested in the story you tell about your own specialness, and as a result, you will be liberated to accomplish the world-changing work you’ve set out to achieve.”

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It

By Kelly McGonigal

Informed by the latest research and combining cutting-edge insights from psychology, economics, neuroscience, and medicine, The Willpower Instinct explains exactly what willpower is, how it works, and why it matters. For example, readers will learn:
Willpower is a mind-body response, not a virtue. It is a biological function that can be improved through mindfulness, exercise, nutrition, and sleep.
Willpower is not an unlimited resource. Too much self-control can actually be bad for your health.
Temptation and stress hijack the brain’s systems of self-control, but the brain can be trained for greater willpower
Guilt and shame over your setbacks lead to giving in again, but self-forgiveness and self-compassion boost self-control.
Giving up control is sometimes the only way to gain self-control.
Willpower failures are contagious—you can catch the desire to overspend or overeat from your friends­­—but you can also catch self-control from the right role models.
In the groundbreaking tradition of Getting Things Done, The Willpower Instinct combines life-changing prescriptive advice and complementary exercises to help readers with goals ranging from losing weight to more patient parenting, less procrastination, better health, and greater productivity at work.

Who

By Geoff Smart

In this instant New York Times Bestseller, Geoff Smart and Randy Street provide a simple, practical, and effective solution to what The Economist calls “the single biggest problem in business today”: unsuccessful hiring. The average hiring mistake costs a company $1.5 million or more a year and countless wasted hours. This statistic becomes even more startling when you consider that the typical hiring success rate of managers is only 50 percent.

The silver lining is that “who” problems are easily preventable. Based on more than 1,300 hours of interviews with more than 20 billionaires and 300 CEOs, Who presents Smart and Street’s A Method for Hiring. Refined through the largest research study of its kind ever undertaken, the A Method stresses fundamental elements that anyone can implement–and it has a 90 percent success rate.

Be the Best at What Matters Most: The Only Strategy You will Ever Need

By Joe Calloway

Winners in business aren’t the ones who do the most things; the winners are the ones who do the most important things

Be the Best at What Matters Most. is about the one essential strategy for business leaders, entrepreneurs, owners, managers and those who want to be one. Simplify, focus, and win by outperforming all your competition on those things that create real value for the customer. This is about substance, not flash, and the ultimate “wow” factors of high quality performance, consistency and relentless improvement.

Thought provoking questions, activities, and action steps are built into every section of the book

Author Joe Calloway, an International Speakers Hall of Fame inductee, has been a popular business speaker for thirty years and worked with hundreds of companies to help them create and sustain success

Author has published four books with Wiley

Be the Best at What Matters Most will help you and your team focus on taking the actions that maximize results, growth, and profit.

Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

By Bo Burlingham

In Small Giants, veteran journalist Bo Burlingham takes us deep inside fourteen remarkable companies that have chosen to march to their own drummer. They include Anchor Brewing, the original microbrewer; CitiStorage Inc., the premier independent records-storage business; Clif Bar & Co., maker of organic energy bars and other nutrition foods; Righteous Babe Records, the record company founded by singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco; Union Square Hospitality Group, the company of restaurateur Danny Meyer; and Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, including the world-famous Zingerman’s Deli of Ann Arbor.

OOPS! 13 Management Practices That Waste Time & Money (and what to do instead)

By Aubrey C. Daniels

In these strained economic times when every penny counts (and demands accountability) you can no longer afford to invest in the financially flawed activities typically associated with . . .

Mergers & Acquisitions

Downsizing

Stretch goals

Performance Appraisal

And you really have to STOP . . .

Promoting people that nobody likes

Overrating smart people

Upsetting everyone with Employee of the Month programs

As the founder of a behavior-based process that has revitalized companies around the world, Aubrey C. Daniels has repeatedly witnessed the 13 most universally used, but ineffective management tactics. Businesses have been wasting time and funds on the same tired approaches for years. Now Daniels reveals WHAT TO DO INSTEAD!

The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations

By James M. Kouzes

For more than 25 years, The Leadership Challenge has been the most trusted source on becoming a better leader, selling more than 2 million copies in over 20 languages since its first publication. Based on Kouzes and Posner’s extensive research, this all-new edition casts their enduring work in context for today’s world, proving how leadership is a relationship that must be nurtured, and most importantly, that it can be learned.

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You (10th Anniversary Edition)

By John C. Maxwell

If you’ve never read The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, you’ve been missing out on one of the best-selling leadership books of all time. If you have read the original version, then you’ll love this new expanded and updated one.

Internationally recognized leadership expert, speaker, and author John C. Maxwell has taken this million-seller and made it even better:

Awesomely Simple: Essential Business Strategies for Turning Ideas Into Action

By John Spence

The six core strategies to elevate any business-and how to implement them-made simple

What do the world’s most successful companies and organization have in common? And what can you actually take away and use from their examples? Distilling the best fundamental business strategies, trusted advisor and strategist John Spence helps you take a hard look at your business and together develop specific plans and action steps that will allow you to dramatically improve the success of your company.

The Five Temptations of a CEO, Anniversary Edition: A Leadership Fable

By Patrick Lencioni

A commemorative edition of the landmark book from Patrick LencioniWhen it was published ten years ago, The Five Temptations of a CEO was like no other business book that came before. Highly sought-after management consultant Patrick Lencioni deftly told the tale of a young CEO who, facing his first annual board review, knows he is failing, but doesn’t know why. Refreshingly original and utterly compelling, this razor-sharp novelette plus self-assessment (written to be read in one sitting) serves as a timeless and potent reminder that success as a leader can come down to practicing a few simple behaviors. Behaviors that are painfully difficult for each of us to master. Any executive can learn how to recognize the mistakes that leaders can make and how to avoid them.

Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide for Leaders, Managers, and Facilitators

By Patrick Lencioni

In the years following the publication of Patrick Lencioni’s best-seller The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, fans have been clamoring for more information on how to implement the ideas outlined in the book. In Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Lencioni offers more specific, practical guidance for overcoming the Five Dysfunctions—using tools, exercises, assessments, and real-world examples.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

By Patrick Lencioni

In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as enthralling and instructive as his first two best-selling books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams.

There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are. In this book, Lencioni brings together his vast experience and many of the themes cultivated in his other best-selling books and delivers a first: a cohesive and comprehensive exploration of the unique advantage organizational health provides.

Topgrading, 3rd Edition

By Bradford D. Smart Ph. D.

Great companies, large and small, rise or fall because of their talent; the more high performers on your team, the more successful your organization will be. Of course, that’s easier said than done. Research shows that only about 25% of all new hires turn out to be high performers.

Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success

By Adam M. Grant Ph.D

For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: passion, hard work, talent, and luck. But today, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. It turns out that at work, most people operate as either takers, matchers, or givers. Whereas takers strive to get as much as possible from others and matchers aim to trade evenly, givers are the rare breed of people who contribute to others without expecting anything in return.

Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

By Margaret Heffernan

Why, after every major accident and blunder, do we look back and say, How could we have been so blind? Why do some people see what others don’t? And how can we change? Drawing on studies by psychologists and neuroscientists, and from interviews with business leaders, whistleblowers, and white collar criminals, distinguished businesswoman and writer Margaret Heffernan examines the phenomenon of willful blindness, exploring the reasons that individuals and groups are blind to impending personal tragedies, corporate collapses, engineering failures-even crimes against humanity.

Less Doing, More Living: Make Everything in Life Easier

By Ari Meisel

“Less is more”—or, more specifically, the less you have to do, the more life you have to live. Efficiency expert Ari Meisel details his “Less Doing” philosophy, which will streamline your life, and make everything easier.

Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Mode

By John Mullins

You have a new venture in mind. And you’ve crafted a business plan so detailed it’s a work of art. Don’t get too attached to it. As John Mullins and Randy Komisar explain in Getting to Plan B, new businesses are fraught with uncertainty. To succeed, you must change the plan in real time as the inevitable challenges arise. In fact, studies show that entrepreneurs who stick slavishly to their Plan A stand a greater chance of failing-and that many successful businesses barely resemble their founders’ original idea.

The Leader Who Had No Title: A Modern Fable on Real Success in Business and in Life

By Robin Sharma

For more than fifteen years, Robin Sharma has been quietly sharing with Fortune 500 companies and many of the super-rich a success formula that has made him one of the most sought-after leadership advisers in the world. Now, for the first time, Sharma makes his proprietary process available to you, so that you can get to your absolute best while helping your organization break through to a dramatically new level of winning in these wildly uncertain times.

Leadership is the most overanalyzed, thoroughly dissected, and utterly confused topic in business. In Leaders Open Doors, author Bill Treasurer helps lighten the leadership load by disti lling that leaders are simply creators of opportunity for others. Using personal stories and anecdotes, Treasurer presents the idea of opendoor leadership-that is, the responsibility that leaders have for noticing, identifying, and creating opportunities for the benefit of people, organizations, and society.

The Focused Business: How Entrepreneurs Can Triumph Over Chaos

By Dave Crenshaw

The Evil Forces of Chaos Are Out to Destroy Your Small Business! Here’s how you can stop them . . . If you own or work in a small business, you’re at risk. Massive risk. Within five years of business operation, more than half of all businesses fail. By year ten, more than 65% are cut down. Why is this? And—more importantly—how can YOU break the cycle? In this highly original take on entrepreneurship, bestselling author, speaker, and business coach Dave Crenshaw confronts Chaos, the prime culprit of small business failure. He then arms you with the superhero utility belt you need to defeat Chaos and build a focused business. Through real-world examples, in-depth worksheets, and a healthy dose of wit, The Focused Business helps business owners and their key employees develop an action plan to overcome the seven Agents of Chaos, stay focused, and maximize profit. For any entrepreneur seeking to create a solid foundation for lasting growth, The Focused Business is the fun, imaginative, and absolutely invaluable guidebook. Book Trailer and more info at: FocusedBusiness.com

Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders

By David Marquet

David Marquet, an experienced Navy officer, was used to giving orders. As newly appointed captain of the USS Santa Fe, a nuclear-powered submarine, he was responsible for more than a hundred sailors, deep in the sea. In this high-stress environment, where there is no margin for error, it was crucial his men did their job and did it well. But the ship was dogged by poor morale, poor performance, and the worst retention in the fleet.

Marquet acted like any other captain until, one day, he unknowingly gave an impossible order, and his crew tried to follow it anyway. When he asked why the order wasn’t challenged, the answer was “Because you told me to.” Marquet realized he was leading in a culture of followers, and they were all in danger unless they fundamentally changed the way they did things.

That’s when Marquet took matters into his own hands and pushed for leadership at every level. Turn the Ship Around! is the true story of how the Santa Fe skyrocketed from worst to first in the fleet by challenging the U.S. Navy’s traditional leader-follower approach. Struggling against his own instincts to take control, he instead achieved the vastly more powerful model of giving control.

No B.S. Marketing To the Affluent

By Dan S. Kennedy

Here it is: no warm ‘n fuzzies—just hard-core strategies from real world trenches…for successfully repositioning your business, products, services and yourself to attract customers or clients for whom price is NOT a determining factor in their purchasing. The TRUTH is it takes no more work to attract customers/clients from the explosively growing Mass-Affluent, Affluent and Ultra-Affluent populations eager to pay premium prices in return for exceptional expertise, service and experiences. This is the fastest and surest path to prosper in tough times (selling to those least affected by recession) and to get rich in good times! • Understand the explosive growth of the affluent customer population—where there is LESS competition and much MORE profit • Practical Strategies Revealed: Lamborghini, Disney, the famous J. Peterman catalogs, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, $2,995 lobsters, Cold Stone Creamery, gourmet pizza, fashion-designer golf bags, and over 50 other fascinating and diverse true-life examples • E-FACTORS: 10 surprising Emotional Buy Triggers the affluent find irresistible • MILLION-DOLLAR MARKETING SYSTEM: Step-by-step blueprint comparable to those developed for six-figure clients, ready for do-it-yourself use • THE MAGIC LANGUAGE OF “MEMBERSHIP”: applied to any business for the affluent…from pizza shops and medical practices to retail stores and pet hotels

No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs: The Ultimate No Holds Barred Kick Butt Take No Prisoners Guide to Time Productivity and Sanity

By Dan S. Kennedy

In this latest edition, Kennedy tackles the technology of today and delivers new insights and tools for boosting personal productivity in keeping with his “less is more” approach. New material includes how to outsource, buying experts, expertise and time. Kennedy covers virtual assistants, errand-running services, and the far-reaching scope of activities and tasks people are paying others to do for them. Kennedy also adds two new chapters discussing how to get more accomplished by leveraging cooperative relationships, why goal setting (and New Year’s Resolutions) fails and how he manages achievement.

V Is for Vulnerable: Life Outside the Comfort Zone

By Seth Godin

V is for Vulnerable looks and feels like a classic picture book. But it’s not for kids, it’s for hardworking adults. It highlights twenty-six of Seth Godin’s principles about treating your work as a form of art, with illustrations by acclaimed cartoonist Hugh MacLeod.

Above the Line: How the Golden Rule Rules the Bottom Line

By Steve Satterwhite

Imagine a place where no matter who you were or how you became part of a company’s ecosystem—as an employee, a customer, a partner or a vendor—you would be treated with dignity, respect and a whole lot of “Wow!”

A place that would lift everyone up. Where everyone could win. Where everyone had the chance to become the best possible versions of themselves, to grow and thrive and discover the best of themselves within the work they do. Where people to find the connection to their true selves, their authentic selves. In their work. Under our watch.

Freedom, Inc.: Free Your Employees and Let Them Lead Your Business to Higher Productivity, Profits, and Growth

By Brian M. Carney

The culture of freedom works–and Freedom, Inc. reveals the secrets of a successful business paradigm based on a trusting, nonhierarchical, liberated environment. The visionary leaders profiled here performed near-miracles in driving their companies to unheard-of levels of success, often from unlikely or disheartening beginnings. Businesses as diverse as insurance company USAA, winemaker Sea Smoke Cellars, Gore & Associates, advertising agency The Richardson Group, Harley-Davidson, and Sun Hydraulics have had the insight and courage to challenge long-held management beliefs about human nature and employees–and radically depart from the traditional command-and-control structures, rules, and policies. By freeing up the individual initiative and risk-taking instincts of every employee, these companies showed they could dramatically outperform their rivals in an array of fiercely competitive industries.

Everyone Communicates, Few Connect: What the Most Effective People Do Differently

By John C. Maxwell

World-renowned leadership expert John C. Maxwell says if you want to succeed, you must learn how to connect with people. And while it may seem like some folks are just born with it, the fact is anyone can learn how to make every communication an opportunity for a powerful connection. In Everyone Communicates, Few Connect, Maxwell shares the Five Principles and Five Practices to develop the crucial skill of connecting, including:

The Ultimate Sales Letter: Attract New Customers. Boost your Sales.

By Dan S. Kennedy

Write Well to Sell Big!

In the age of e-mail and instant communication, great sales copy is indispensable to closing a deal. But too many sales letters end up in the junk file or the wastebasket. In this new edition of his top-selling book, author Dan Kennedy explains why some sales letters work and most don’t. And he shows how to write copy that any business can use.

Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less

By Joe Pulizzi

One of the world’s leading experts on content marketing, Joe Pulizzi explains how to draw prospects and customers in by creating information and content they actually want to engage with. No longer can we interrupt our customers with mediocre content (and sales messages) our customers don’t care about.

Outliers: The Story of Success

By Malcolm Gladwell

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers”–the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?

His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.

Brilliant and entertaining, Outliers is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.

No B.S. Direct Marketing: The Ultimate No Holds Barred Kick Butt Take No Prisoners Direct Marketing for Non-Direct Marketing Businesses

By Dan S. Kennedy

Kennedy dares marketers to dramatically simplify their marketing, refocusing on what works. Updated to address the newest media and marketing methods, this marketing master plan — from marketing master Kennedy — delivers a short list of radically different, little-known, profit-proven direct mail strategies for ANY business. Strategies are illustrated by case history examples from an elite team of consultants — all phenomenally successful at borrowing direct marketing strategies from the world of mail-order, TV infomercials, etc., to use in ’ordinary’ businesses including retail stores, restaurants, and sales.

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

By Seth Godin

A tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea. For millions of years, humans have been seeking out tribes, be they religious, ethnic, economic, political, or even musical (think of the Deadheads). It?s our nature.

Now the Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time. All those blogs and social networking sites are helping existing tribes get bigger. But more important, they?re enabling countless new tribes to be born?groups of ten or ten thousand or ten million who care about their iPhones, or a political campaign, or a new way to fight global warming.

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

By Daniel H. Pink

Whether we’re employees pitching colleagues on a new idea, entrepreneurs enticing funders to invest, or parents and teachers cajoling children to study, we spend our days trying to move others. Like it or not, we’re all in sales now.

To Sell Is Human offers a fresh look at the art and science of selling. As he did in Drive and A Whole New Mind, Daniel H. Pink draws on a rich trove of social science for his counterintuitive insights. He reveals the new ABCs of moving others (it’s no longer “Always Be Closing”), explains why extraverts don’t make the best salespeople, and shows how giving people an “off-ramp” for their actions can matter more than actually changing their minds.

IF YOU THINK YOU KNOW SALES…YOU DON’T KNOW JACK! “Jack Daly stands above all others. His energy is matched only by his genius and understanding about what makesthe best sales organizations. It’s not commission strategies, it’s not about glossy sales materials; it is about people.

The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

By Gary Keller

Since its April, 2013 publication The ONE Thing has made more than 125 appearances on national bestseller lists, including #1 Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Publisher’s Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Reuters, BookScan, and 800CEOREAD.

The ONE Thing was chosen one of the Top 5 Business Books of 2013 by Hudson’s Booksellers and one of Top 30 Business Books of 2013 by Executive Book Summaries.

People are using this simple, powerful concept to avoid overwhelming distractions in their personal and work lives so they can focus on what matters most. Companies are helping their employees be more productive with study groups, training, and coaching. Churches are conducting classes and recommending from the pulpit.

Disregard the myth of the lone professional “superman” and the rest of our culture’s go-it alone mentality. The real path to success in your work and in your life is through creating an inner circle of “lifeline relationships” – deep, close relationships with a few key trusted individuals who will offer the encouragement, feedback, and generous mutual support every one of us needs to reach our full potential. Whether your dream is to lead a company, be a top producer in your field, overcome the self-destructive habits that hold you back, lose weight or make a difference in the larger world, Who’s Got Your Back will give you the roadmap you’ve been looking for to achieve the success you deserve.

Keith Ferrazzi, the internationally renowned thought leader, consultant, and bestselling author of Never Eat Alone, shows us that becoming a winner in any field of endeavor requires a trusted team of advisors who can offer guidance and help to hold us accountable to achieving our goals. It is the reason PH.D candidates have advisor teams, top executives have boards, world class athletes have fitness coaches, and presidents have cabinets.

Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time

By Keith Ferrazzi

The secret, master networker Keith Ferrazzi claims, is in reaching out to other people. As Ferrazzi discovered early in life, what distinguishes highly successful people from everyone else is the way they use the power of relationships—so that everyone wins.

In Never Eat Alone, Ferrazzi lays out the specific steps—and inner mindset—he uses to reach out to connect with the thousands of colleagues, friends, and associates on his Rolodex, people he has helped and who have helped him.

How Successful People Think: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life

By John C. Maxwell

A Wall Street Journal bestseller, HOW SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE THINKis the perfect, compact read for today’s fast-paced world. America’s leadership expert John C. Maxwell will teach you how to be more creative and when to question popular thinking. You’ll learn how to capture the big picture while focusing your thinking. You’ll find out how to tap into your creative potential, develop shared ideas, and derive lessons from the past to better understand the future. With these eleven keys to more effective thinking, you’ll clearly see the path to personal success.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

By Ben Horowitz

While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies.

The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea

By Bob Burg

The Go-Giver tells the story of an ambitious young man named Joe who yearns for success. Joe is a true go-getter, though sometimes he feels as if the harder and faster he works, the further away his goals seem to be. And so one day, desperate to land a key sale at the end of a bad quarter, he seeks advice from the enigmatic Pindar, a legendary consultant referred to by his many devotees simply as the Chairman.

Becoming a Category of One: How Extraordinary Companies Transcend Commodity and Defy Comparison

By Joe Calloway

A revised and updated edition of the bestselling “no-nonsense guide to beating the competition.”-Publisher’s Weekly

Becoming a Category of One reveals how extraordinary companies do what they do so well and gives you the tools and ideas to help your business emulate their success. Packed with real case studies and personal reflections from successful business leaders, it helps you apply the best practices of the best companies to set yourself apart from your competitors and turn your business into a market leader.

Are you over-extended, over-distracted, and overwhelmed? Do you work at a breakneck pace all day, only to find that you haven’t accomplished the most important things on your agenda when you leave the office?

The world has changed and the way we work has to change, too. With wisdom from 20 leading creative minds, Manage Your Day-to-Day will give you a toolkit for tackling the new challenges of a 24/7, always-on workplace.

Best-selling author and popular speaker Garr Reynolds is back in this newly revised edition of his classic, best-selling book, Presentation Zen, in which he showed readers there is a better way to reach the audience through simplicity and storytelling, and gave them the tools to confidently design and deliver successful presentations.

In this new edition, Garr gives his readers new, fresh examples to draw inspiration from, with a whole new chapter for those who present on more technical and educational topics based on techniques used by many presenters who give high-level talks at TED and other powerhouse events. Whether the reader is in research, technology, business, or education–this book will show them how to take what could look like a really dry presenation and reinvigorate the material in totally fresh (and sometimes interactive!) ways that will make it memorable and resonate with the audience.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

By Chip Heath

Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives?

The primary obstacle is a conflict that’s built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed bestseller Made to Stick. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems—the rational mind and the emotional mind—that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort—but if it is overcome, change can come quickly.

In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people—employees and managers, parents and nurses—have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results:

The lowly medical interns who managed to defeat an entrenched, decades-old medical practice that was endangering patients.

The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping.

The manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard tool of customer service

The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything

By Stephen M.R. Covey

With nearly 750,000 copies in print, this instant classic shows that establishing trust is “the one thing that changes everything” (Marcus Buckingham, coauthor of Now, Discover Your Strengths) in both business and life. Trust, says Stephen M.R. Covey, is the very basis of the new global economy, and he shows how trust—and the speed at which it is established with clients, employees, and constituents—is the essential ingredient for any high–performance, successful organization.

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

By Simon Sinek

Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty?

In studying the leaders who’ve had the greatest influence in the world, Simon Sinek discovered that they all think, act, and communicate in the exact same way-and it’s the complete opposite of what everyone else does. People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers might have little in common, but they all started with why.

If you read nothing else on managing yourself, read these 10 articles (plus the bonus article “How Will You Measure Your Life?” by Clayton M. Christensen). We’ve combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles to select the most important ones to help you maximize yourself.

Chet Holmes helps his clients blow away both the competition and their own expectations. And his advice starts with one simple concept: focus! Instead of trying to master four thousand strategies to improve your business, zero in on the few essential skill areas that make the big difference.

The Ultimate Sales Machine shows you how to tune up and soup up virtually every part of your business by spending just an hour per week on each impact area you want to improve?sales, marketing, management, and more.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

By Malcolm Gladwell

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.

Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable…About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

By Patrick Lencioni

In his latest page-turning work of business fiction, best-selling author Patrick Lencioni provides readers with another powerful and thought-provoking book, this one centered around a cure for the most painful yet underestimated problem of modern business: bad meetings. And what he suggests is both simple and revolutionary.

Flipping the Switch: Unleash the Power of Personal Accountability Using the QBQ!

By John G. Miller

In his bestselling book QBQ! The Question Behind the Question, John G. Miller revealed how personal accountability helps to create opportunity, overcome obstacles, and achieve goals by eliminating blame, complaining, and procrastination. The result? Stronger organizations, more dynamic teams, and healthier relationships.

Now Miller takes readers to the next level to show how they can use the power of the QBQ! and personal accountability every day.

When a light switch is flipped the flow of energy that is released reaches the lightbulb in an instant, bringing it to life. Similarly, asking the right kind of question-a QBQ-is the first step to empowering what Miller calls the Advantage Principles-five essential practices that will lead to a richer experience in every aspect of life.

Think Outside the Inbox: The B2B Marketing Automation Guide

By David Cummings

Marketing automation has been called the most transformative advancement in sales and marketing since the advent of CRM. Never before have sales and marketing professionals had so much insight into prospects’ interests, behaviors, and buying intentions. Many people think of email marketing, and the inbox, as an effective part of online lead generation and nurturing, and it is. But marketing automation provides a complete solution, with the inbox as just one piece of the toolkit. Learn about marketing automation and how it can benefit your business today.

Mastering the Rockefeller Habits

By Verne Harnish

What are the underlying handful of fundamentals that haven’t changed for over a hundred years? From Harnish’s famous “Mastering a One Page Strategic Plan” process that has been a best-selling article on the web to his concise outline of eight practical actions you can take to strengthen your culture, this book is a compilation of best practices adapted from some of the best-run firms on the planet.

Perform Like a Rock Star & Still Have Time for Lunch

By Orna W. Drawas

Everyone wants to be a star at some point in their life. Become a true leader, a real mover, and quite simply, someone who people can count on to makes things happen. Inside the pages of Perform Like a Rock Star and Still Have Time for Lunch you can uncover ways to attain whole new levels in your own personal peak performance that can bring you greater success and fulfillment in your career – than you ever thought possible – and still have time for lunch . . . and so much more.

Customer service isn’t a department–it’s a philosophy that includes every person and aspect of the best and brightest companies. In a tough, competitive, and price-sensitive economy, customer service is one of the most essential tools to separate your business from the competition. In this sequel to the bestseller The Cult of the Customer, Shep Hyken delivers seven powerful strategies that any organization can implement to create greater customer and employee loyalty:

Membership: What if you treated the people you serve like members instead of customers?

Serious FUN: What if your employees felt a sense of fulfillment and enjoyment that made them loyal to you and your customers?

Partnership: What if your customers thought of you as a partner rather than just another vendor?

Hiring: What if you could implement innovative hiring processes to support your customer-service mission?

The After-Experience: What if you could create a memorable, positive experience after someone did business with you?

Community: What if you could create a community of evangelists–loyal customers who brag about you to their friends and associates?

Walking the Walk: What if every person in your company didn’t just deliver, but lived and breathed your vision for amazing customer service?

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

By Atul Gawande

In his latest bestseller, Atul Gawande shows what the simple idea of the checklist reveals about the complexity of our lives and how we can deal with it.

The modern world has given us stupendous know-how. Yet avoidable failures continue to plague us in health care, government, the law, the financial industry—in almost every realm of organized activity. And the reason is simple: the volume and complexity of knowledge today has exceeded our ability as individuals to properly deliver it to people—consistently, correctly, safely. We train longer, specialize more, use ever-advancing technologies, and still we fail. Atul Gawande makes a compelling argument that we can do better, using the simplest of methods: the checklist. In riveting stories, he reveals what checklists can do, what they can’t, and how they could bring about striking improvements in a variety of fields, from medicine and disaster recovery to professions and businesses of all kinds. And the insights are making a difference. Already, a simple surgical checklist from the World Health Organization designed by following the ideas described here has been adopted in more than twenty countries as a standard for care and has been heralded as “the biggest clinical invention in thirty years” (The Independent).

The Habit Factor: An Innovative Method to Align Habits with Goals to Achieve Success

By Martin Grunburg

Everyone desires to achieve their goals and realize success, yet few do. The Habit Factor® encapsulates nearly 3,000 years of philosophy and success literature to reveal the most elemental and profound truth governing all personal achievement: HABIT is the single-greatest factor in a person’s ability to realize a life of success and achievement. For the first time ever, The Habit Factor® reveals its proven step-by-step methodology — a process that has received acclaim from top success coaches, personal trainers and PhD’s around the world. This book takes the reader on a “mind-bending adventure of insight and application” to explore the deepest mysteries of habit. Questions never before asked, or answered, are tackled within these pages, and you are certain to come out the other side awakened, empowered and transformed.

Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone

By Mark Goulston M.D.

The first make-or-break step in persuading anyone to do any thing is getting them to hear you out. Whether the person is a harried colleague, a stressed-out client, or an insecure spouse, things will go from bad to worse if you can’t break through emotional barricades. Drawing on his experience as a psychiatrist, business consultant, and coach, and backed by the latest scientific research, author Mark Goulston shares simple but power ful techniques readers can use to really get through to people–whether they’re coworkers, friends, strangers, or enemies. Getting through is a fine art but a critical one. With the help of this groundbreaking book readers will be able to turn the “impossible” and “unreachable” people in their lives into allies, devoted customers, loyal colleagues, and lifetime friends.

Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less THIRD EDITION

By Sam Carpenter

Work The System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less, guides the reader in modifying his or her perception of the world, moving from a false vision of chaotic conglomeration, to a more accurate one: that life is an orderly collection of individual linear systems each of which can be improved and perfected. The reader is guided through the process of ”getting” this new vision, and then through the specifics of applying it via a “system improvement” protocol. For start-ups or existing businesses the methodology is simple, believable, and mechanical; not mystical or theoretical. Carpenter developed this “Systems Mindset” protocol in the business he purchased in 1984 and still owns today. With that company, he moved from an 80-100 hour workweek to a 2 hour workweek, while multiplying his income dozens of times over. He is CEO of an international business consulting firm and several other businesses and non-profits, each operated in the same systems mindset fashion. With a diverse background in engineering, construction, publishing, telecommunications and journalism, he calls his approach a “workingman’s philosophy.” See workthesystem.com/testimonials.

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

By Seth Godin

There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there’s a third team, the linchpins. These people figure out what to do when there’s no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.

Linchpins are the essential building blocks of great organizations. They may not be famous but they’re indispensable. And in today’s world, they get the best jobs and the most freedom.